The Cross of Clouds

For a while now, I have been a spiritual person. Not a good person, maybe, but a spiritual one. By "spiritual person" I mean that when I wake up I know that a God that I have interacted with before still exists, and throughout the entire day, that is my truth. I may say a lot of prayers and try to resist gossiping. I may act hateful to my husband. I may cry off and on all day because it's rainy outside and I call lots of people on the phone trying to reach out to someone and get a voicemail every time. But no matter what, when I go to sleep, I still know that God is real and that we have a connection. It's like how I know I'm a mother of two daughters even when I'm away from them for 8 hours at work. Believing in God is the part of my identity that reaches down into all of my layers. It's there all of the time, sometimes helping me in hard situations, and sometimes, when I'm showing the most vicious parts of my personality, seeming to be barely more than irony.

Part of my life as a spiritual person is just keeping my eyes open and noticing when God has a message for me. I think that the most common way God speaks to my heart is sending me people to pray for. Sometimes they are family members, sometimes they are friends, sometimes I read about them online and sometimes they are strangers I see. When I feel a pang of concern for someone, I believe that God is asking me to pray for their needs.

Every now and then, though, God speaks to me in special ways. I read an essay where a Catholic educator called those instances "postcards" from God. I'll be writing much more about remarkable interactions in future blog entries. But for now, I will explain the one that happened this summer, the one that gave me the name for my blog.

I was vacationing in Hot Springs, and I was troubled. I sensed anger in my husband, a rising anger that he was obviously trying to stifle. I didn't know what caused it or how I would deal with it, but I was grateful that we were both trying to smile and laugh so that our daughters would have a fun trip. One afternoon we were leaving the beautiful wooded setting of the science museum, and when we came out from underneath the trees, I saw right before me in the sky a perfect cross in the clouds hanging below the formless ones.

The cross looked like two simple beams of wood, and there was a small horizontal cloud beneath it, to provide the "ground" and complete the picture. When I saw it, I knew God had put it there for me. I showed my husband and children and did not think about photographing it until we were already driving off, which breaks my heart. Throughout the rest of the vacation, I thought about the cross and wondered why God had given that gift to me. What did he want to tell me? That he loved me? That he was smiling on our family? That things had been hard but would be all right now?

Back at home, I wrote in my prayer journal and sketched the cross as I remembered it. Two days after our return, I faced separating from my husband and embarked on one of the most painful weeks of my life. In prayer one night I reached a point where I was willing to give up anything God asked me to - my house, my security, my family life, anything. I will be writing much more about that night in future entries. As the horrible days passed and I emerged from my crisis intact and feeling powered by God, I thought about the cross in the clouds. I realized why God had given me that: I was going to need to be strong. He knew that the only way I could survive the days ahead was to get all of my strength from him, and he gave me a cross of clouds to remind me that he's not just an idea in my head. He is as real as the earth underneath me, the sky above me and the air that fills my lungs. He gave me a cross of clouds to say, "I'm always here. Don't forget that."