when you're smilin'

Last week I wrote about rainbows, those fleetingly ephemeral manifestations of water and light.  Over Christmas I saw one as I was driving through a brief shower on the freeway.  I wanted to stop and take a photograph, but by the time I had pulled off the highway it was gone.  Many of God’s blessings are like that.  They happen, and we drive on through and forget about them as we get consumed in the next big worry in our lives. 

But if we are really tuned in to see God in the minutia of life, we find the most amazing surprises along the way.  One night I was sitting in a parking lot waiting for my husband to pick up our dinner at a small restaurant.  I looked up and saw this face smiling down on me.  I did a double take.  Then I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture.  It was dark out, so the quality of the photo isn’t good, but I bet even you can see this smile.  And what came to me were the lyrics of an old song: “When you’re smilin’,the whole world smiles with you.” 

I did a little research and found that the words of that song were written by Frank Sinatra, information that made me smile even more because Frank Sinatra was my mother’s all-time favorite performer.  I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the love of Frank Sinatra as a child, when Mom would let me stay up late to watch his weekly television show.  As a young woman I went to see Frank perform live in Indianapolis’ Market Square Arena.  Sitting in the back row, I waited for him to sing his personal theme song, “Put Your Dreams Away.”  By that time, he had replaced it with “My Way”, an anthem to self-centered single-mindedness.  But that night, after singing his new theme, he came back out and did an encore of “Put Your Dreams Away,” as though it was just for me.  I screamed and cried just like one of his original bobby-soxer fans. 

So here I was in December in a parking lot in Montrose, California, seeing a smile on the side of a building, recalling the lyrics of my favorite vocal artist, thinking of my Mom and feeling the blessing of God…if a heart is open to the images around, the hunt for hope is always rewarded.  

These last two years, it’s been hard to know if the masked world is smiling with you.  But recently, standing in a pharmacy line I was behind a darling, little girl.  Perched in a shopping cart, she was scrutinizing this old, masked woman standing six feet away.  I couldn’t help smiling at her.  And she knew it.  She could see it in my eyes.  She cocked her head and smiled back.  I winked at her, and she did the cutest double blink.  

It’s our job to keep on smilin’.  If we do, the world, even the walls, might smile back. 

Love, Liz