Here, There, Everywhere...

It's Sunday night. Needing to get a few weekly food items, I drove down Bosque to the grocery store. On my way past the Fair Grounds, I remembered something I learned in Sunday School as a child. God is everywhere. Later I learned the word omnipresent , which sounds much more intelligent, but doesn't carry the same punch as saying God is everywhere.

This past week was the Heart of Texas Fair and Rodeo. Last night was the last night. Tonight, in the darkness, surrounded by a breeze that wants desperately to be cool, and in the midst of gathering rain, the fair grounds are desolate, despite the numerous displays and attractions that have yet to be disassembled. I imagine the wind blowing through the asphalt and exhibit buildings, thrashing about discarded tickets, popped balloons, and the remains of what amounts to junk mail collected at vendor booths.

I suppose if God is everywhere, if God is, indeed, omnipresent, then the Holy Spirit is having a field day in this insignificant corner of the world, abandoned temporarily by human activity. I also suppose this thought doesn't excite many people, me included. Speaking of God's everywhere-presence carries little weight when the setting doesn't lend to our lives being important. Plots of land existing a day after massive activity has ceased lends nothing to my striving to be consequential. They are just places with wind and junk and the ghosts of revelers past.

Driving by the fairgrounds, contemplating the emptiness of it all, I thought of loss. I thought of how we are all walking around with the weight of loss, both experienced and inevitable, and how in many ways loss defines the condition we are in. We once were lost, now we're found, once were blind, now we have sight-- But we just keep losing until the end.

In light of all this, all we have to offer is a scratched-voice cry for help. Luckily, God is here, present, ready to fill the empty spaces, even has he dances along the trash filled streets of a now-over county fair.