I shouldn't be here this morning - typing at my computer blog station. When there's a to-do list a mile long, and places I must go in number just as intimidating, this can be a dangerous place to be. How well I know it an object of ambush. And yet I feel something worthwhile nudging me to elucidate what an article I just now read testified to me, or should I say where an article I just read took me.

My daughter-in-law, Kim, calls certain moments magical. Well, my present subject is similar, only rather than involving circumstance and place and the delerium these can invoke, when as she says, "all the ions in the universe line up together" it is entirely inward - though eager to air itself some way outward .

The article I read was written, first-person, by someone who had experienced both as a child and an adult the "thing" I am talking about. As a young boy with a writer father and a reader mom, the author found himself first awakened to this mysterious sensation while listening to his mother read "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," by C.S. Lewis.

At the time the boy's home was an old abandoned mill in southern Italy, elected by his father as a place of summer residence. Father was a whimsical soul with a tradition of settling his family into strange lodgings. As usual this one was big and rambling much like the house in Lewis' story, with those "endless rooms" that came to mean for both the author and Lewis "the true house that we never seem to come to the end of", each room of which is more mysterious and magnificent than the last. Lewis has more about his personal experience in regards the odd something in his book "Surprised by Joy:"

"I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described, and then found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it." Lewis name for it was "joy" and as a child it came over him when reading certain books.

Trying to enunciate this inner place in my own life is like trying to pin down a moonbeam. I may serve better by giving instances. A book can summon it, but just as often it is an abstract, though significant concept, a 'vision' of sorts that comes during prayer, or Bible reading, or while meditating on Jesus and the amazing Person that He is. Amazing - like His answering the trifling little prayers I sometimes forget I prayed - if only to encourage and let me know He heard every word. These little kindnesses of His drench me in incredulity, invoking " the joy thing" that He really is the God who numbers every hair, attends unto each sparrow when it falls.

Or it can come, while fascinated I watch light and shade act out a movie on the wall beside the bathtub when I am taking a good long soak. I seem to see another world there, transendent to this one, in that pattern of light and dark, a place I could enter if I just concentrated hard enough. Sounds corny, I know, but true nevertheless. The comfort is that God never finds his children corny when they are raptured over the wonders of this awesome cosmos - both physical and metaphysical - that He thought up.

A hymn can do it, or a poem. But especially does it woo me when I hear of amazing coincidences in peoples' lives (or as some say there are no coincidences), or in my own when I know without a single doubt that God has spoken to me in esoteric language. These are moments I have heard identified as common grace; to myself I call it finding God in the common and the uncommon. It is then He is most magnified in my life, when I can feel Him hovering close enough to reach out and touch; and yet not quite. A whole book I know of was written about the coincidence phenomen, identifying it as a wink from God. To paraphrase the author, "like Grandma winking across the table at Johnny when he's gotten himself into trouble with his parents.

While these few examples of mine fall short of real description (the article this morning called it "a sense of moreness - an unidentifiable something" that we yearn toward), I guess all said, that if I could describe it - or reach it, then it would no longer be what it is, the indescribable. In some other lanuage I might find a word like that: the thing sought but never reached. A linguist would know. And God.