It comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes at the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger quieter life come flowing in. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind. We can do it only for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us.~C.S. Lewis (From Mere Christianity)

The morning's entrance began with sunlight like fire behind the stand of trees at the back of my house. An ordinary day. But that evening, I walked out my front door. Nothing was normal now. Police cars lined the parking lot, blue lights twirling silently atop the vehicles. Three long, red fire trucks parked near the entrance of my condo complex. A neighbor walked up to me as I stood on my porch. "Something horrible happened. A four-year-old boy drowned in the pond. He didn't make it." 

"What's going on?" I whispered.

My neighbor, her face tear-stained, her cheeks flushed deep pink, said, "I don't know any details. The child didn't live here. He was visiting. That's all I know."

The community of neighbors stood on the sidelines, witnesses to a mother's grief as her wails echoed through the air, the sky gray, bruised, ready to pour rain. Sparks of lightening. 

Now this morning, the reality of a child's death bores into my thoughts. I want to go back to bed. Go to sleep. Numb myself from the pain. Yet the Lord seemed to gently shake me, reminding me of the image I had when I stood in church yesterday. I imagined Jesus holding this precious boy on his hip, the child's arm wrapped around the Lord's neck. Safe. Laughing in the arms of God. I sensed the Lord prompted me to write a card to the family to share this visual. "But Lord," I said, "I don't know this family. They are in such pain. They may think I'm crazy. They may derive no comfort from something I conjured up." 

I put the note on the little hill by the pond where others placed flowers and balloons and teddy bears--deciding to listen to that other voice.