A friend of mine has a five year old son. The father promised to take his son on a ferry ride to Angel Island this past weekend. The two of them boarded the ferry, rode across the Bay to the Island and when they arrived, the boy hopped off the ferry, excited, looking all around. And then slowly, the boy became more and more disappointed.
“We got on the wrong ferry,” he told his dad.
“We must have gone the wrong direction. This isn’t where you said we were going,” the boy insisted.
The father was confused and asked his son what was wrong.
The boy surveyed the scene– looking left, looking right.
“You said we were going to Angel Island and I don’t see any angels here!”
The story gave me pause. We all laughed when we heard it. But what if? What if we could remember what it’s like to believe in angels? What if we believed that every time we set out on a journey, that upon arriving at our destination, we would be greeted by angels. Maybe Angel Island was full of angels, they just weren’t dressed in silver with gossamer wings. Maybe we just have to take the time to look a little harder.
I was in the grocery store the other day inspecting blueberries. The season seems to be coming to an end and the berries in the box looked small and bitter, but I wanted blueberries and so I held the plastic box to my eyes. An older woman beside me was doing the same thing. We stopped and looked at each other. She laughed at me. I laughed at her.
“They look small,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“But I’m in the mood for blueberries,” she said.
“So am I.”
“Oh, it’s just money, isn’t it?” she said and put the box in her cart. I did the same. The blueberries were sweet.
Today I bought black figs for a fortune. Because they remind me of a fig tree we had at our home in Phoenix.
“I love figs,” I told the cashier as I was checking out.
“I grew up with a fig tree,” he told me. ”I took it for granted. I could eat figs whenever I wanted.”
“Except for when the birds got them first,” I said and told him I had a fig tree too.
“That’s true, it was always a race between me and the birds,” he said.
Somehow thinking of him and his fig tree, me and my fig tree makes the figs on the kitchen counter sweeter and I haven’t even eaten any.
Maybe angels are everywhere, we just need to look.