From Wit’s End

This year was one of those awkward years when Independence Day landed right in the middle of the week on a Wednesday. I took no extra vacation on either side of the day like many of my colleagues at work, but I was still thankful for the day off, when I might recuperate a bit from recent events. I treated the day as if it were Saturday, by puttering around the house, and/or going out to the store in the afternoon to get something I needed or wanted.

There was one thing notable about the day, however. The “Sci-Fi” Channel was playing an all-day marathon of the old show “The Twilight Zone”, and no matter what I did that day, it seemed I kept coming back to the cathode ray tube to catch another episode of strangeness. It was usually only an hour or so at a time all throughout the day, but I kept coming back to Rod Serling for comfort for some reason. I think it was because this first half of 2001 had been such a strange ride that i found “the Twilight Zone” not so strange at all, but almost hospitable in its purposeful incongruity. Ah, Mr. Serling, truly you are a man who grasps at this strange existence we call the human condition. I watched the last episode I could stand at around 10:30 that evening: it was the episode starring William Shatner, in which a man flying home after being released from an insane asylum spies a gremlin on the wing of the plane he is going home in, and nobody believes him when he tries to tell them what he has seen. Having only heard of this particular episode before, I was glad to finally see it, finding myself not a little sympathetic to such a man.

And as I made my lunch and prepared for bed that evening, I remembered the small segment of a rainbow I had seen in the sky that afternoon as I was driving home from the store. That small sign of Divine Promise [according to Genesis 9:12-17] helped me remember the hope that had been given to all of us by God, when he promised the redemption of life from death so long ago, and then fulfilled this promise in Jesus Christ. And with all the uncertainty in my head and my heart and the world in general, that was one thing I could be certain of, and I slept the better for it that night.