My blue feather moment

To bring anything into your life, imagine that it’s already there.

Some of you who have read Illusions, The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach, will recognize the quote and the blue feather reference. For those who haven’t read the book, and I strongly encourage you to do so, both refer to the ability to bring things into your life just by thinking about them.

Well, Ella and I had a blue feather moment while thrifting this past Friday.

I wrote in a previous blog that we are hosting an exchange student for the upcoming school year, and since that post, we have had numerous online chats with Duc (pronounced Duke), our “son” from Vietnam, who will join our household in August.  In one of the conversations early last week, he asked if we had spiders.  An odd question, I thought, until I learned that Vietnam has spiders as big as your hand, and that Duke uses an electric fly swatter to dispatch the scary creatures.  Thankfully, we don’t have such big arachnids, and we only have a regular fly swatter, a pink one that we never can seem to find when we need it.  We laughed at the idea of an electrified deterrent for nuisance insects, and then didn’t give it a second thought.  Fortunately, the first thought was enough.

If you had it clear in your thoughts, it is even this moment barreling down on you like a Mack truck.

On Friday afternoon, I got off work early so we could attend the first day of a church yard sale.  It was a semi-lucrative sale for us, with plenty of books and CDs, but what really stunned me was the electric fly swatter (also called a mosquito racket) sitting in the middle of one of the sale tables.   I picked it up, and it felt and looked like a badminton racket, with a little button on the side.  Being the curious sort, I pressed the button and then touched the netting.  Needless to say, the shock was more than enough to get my attention.  After I recovered and my finger had stopped tingling, I decided the hand-sized spiders of Vietnam, or the puny spiders of Georgia wouldn’t stand a chance against me as long as wielded this $3 weapon of mass insect destruction.  It quickly went into my box.

An electrifying solution to hand-sized spiders

Ella had not seen it yet, and as I wandered around, I had the evil idea of giving her an electrified swat on the rear.  Discretion is the better part of valor, though, and since I didn’t want to sleep on the couch that night, I just showed it to her, and explained what it was.  Her eyes got big as she mentally made the connection between our conversation with Duc and the item in my hand.

Most people will chalk this up to coincidence, but I’m not so sure. To quote Shakespeare, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Or, as the reluctant messiah says:

Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.