This is a story I keep forgetting to tell when I manage to get internet access. But I want to mention it.
It was Saturday and I was driving across Washington to the coast. My GPS didn’t tell me until I got there, but I even had to take a car ferry over. I’ve never done that before, and all I knew about them was from the TV show Grey’s Anatomy where I believe there was one episode where one of these boats capsized (or was blown up) to utter catastrophe. The ride was uneventful, and I just remember the car behind me was this tall guy and his wife driving an orange Nissan Z. I was looking at it and asking him about it, because I’m thinking about the Infiniti G37 (though I’m in love with the handling of the FX). This is a tangent, but we talked about cars, and I was checking out his, and then a night later, I saw their car parked outside the same place I’m staying at in La Push. What a small world.
Anyway, I was texting with Curtis, and mentioned that when I stopped for gas, I’d seen Drifter IPA in the cold display. He likes trying different beers and sending me pictures of the bottles. Drifter was one he’d sent a week or so ago. He texted back, “I like when you find things that remind you of me. Do you feel like a fairy?”
I wrote back that I think I’m just really good at finding things, that I’m more of a magnet than a fairy, that sometimes I fnd things that make people believe in more.
He wrote back, “Find god for me.”
I got chills when I read that. This is something I could do. Every person’s god is personal. It’s a matter of them seeing and believing in signs that seem to add up to more than just mere coincidence. It’s about timing. Like the time my mother was at her most desperate and thinking about suicide, and her car’s radio display suddenly went blank and tuned into one station, a gospel station, and a man telling her that God loved her, God understood and God wanted her to hang on. But you have to be willing to believe and you have to be open to seeing. It’s like the Indiana Jones first step of faith. If you believe it, it will be there.
So I wrote back, “Do you really want me to?” Who better to point out signs than me, who has made a life’s work and calling out of following signs. But I didn’t want to waste my time if he was just fucking around.
“I’d believe,” he wrote back.
“Are you open to believing god exists for you, and are you open to whatever form god appears in?” I knew if he answered yes to both those questions, and truly did both, very likely he would get his proof.
“Sure. She may be you,” he wrote.
Funny. I’m not. But I’m a good messenger.
“Okay, Curtis. Remember that you asked to be shown then let it go. Take every moment forward in your life openly, honestly with attention. Look for the connections. Most of all, believe the greater picture will become clear. And yes, I hope I can be there when you witness it.”
Finding proof of god and universe is like finding love. It appears when you least expect it.
His response is just a little smiley face and I kind of feel like he’s just humoring me. And then he send me this picture, to show me the new beer he’s drinking:
I was more astounded by the words in the background of the picture. I wrote back asking him if he’d posed the picture that way on purpose.
“Over my bed?” he asked.
I asked if he’d randomly just taken a picture of the bottle or if he said to himself that he needed all those background elements. He said nothing was on purpose, that he’d had to turn that way because of glare.
He’d asked me to find god for him, which to me just means find signs that make him believe there’s something around us, outside of us, a greater interconnectedness at work. He said that he’d believe, and I asked him if he was open to believing that god existed and willing to be open to whatever form he came in (I was talking about signs, evidence). Next I asked him to let go of the question and look for the connections. And he randomly sends me a picture with “I want to believe” in the background, and those words weren’t included consciously, on purpose.
I asked him if would accept what just happened as proof of magic or if he needed more.
“Who said I didn’t believe in magic?” he asked.
“Believing in magic is the first step in believing in god,” I said.