Sunday night they were everywhere.  I took the dog out for the last trip of the night, and the yard was a dark field of blinking yellow lights. I’ve seen fireflies before, but not like this in years.  I think it was the spontaneity that got me, the beautiful unpredictability of light where none had been expected.

I don’t know where the fireflies had been.  Too many dried out, drought -stricken summers, too much bug killer, I don’t know.  But it did my heart good to see something so unscripted, so beyond my control. Whatever I could have planned wouldn’t have been half as wonderful.

By shear coincidence Sunday was Pentecost, that day when we remember the unplanned arrival of the fiery presence of God in the church.  The hope of the Christian faith is a God who can do more than we hope or expect.  We’re counting on fireflies, the light of God showing up in people from whom we would not expect it in places where we would not plan to find it.  And at least for one night it seemed to be the most reasonable sort of hope in all the world.