In the Twinkling of an Eye

By Bobby Neal Winters
On the day this is set to appear in the paper, I have an appointment to get a haircut.  As I write this, it is still not legal to get a haircut in our state, at least not from someone you are not living with.
I reread that paragraph and it makes me wonder.  What would I have thought if I’d been shown this one year ago. No, what if I’d been shown this three months ago.  Klara Blixen, the Danish author, said that God made the world round so that we never be able to see too far down the road.  Thank you, God.
I was going through emails yesterday because I need to have my facts lined-up nice and straight.  It took me back to the beginning of the semester and through mid-March.  The rapidity of the change reminded me of one time when I was coming back from Kansas City with almost all my family in the car.  It was late and it was dark.  The car in front of me hit a deer and had to stop, so I had to stop.  Looking at the emails reminded me of that.  
I’ve been having scripture running through my head: “Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.”
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that the last trumpet has blown. (For poetic purposes, I almost used trump in that sentence, but too many people would’ve read it as Trump.  It opens a whole can of worms.) But doesn’t this metaphorically describe what has happened? In the twinkling of an eye, we’ve all been changed.
I have a broad range of friends on Facebook from the Rabid Right to the Looney Left.  Not everyone can be perfect like me and you.  Some people are very eager to get out of isolation. There are some who honestly don’t believe this has ever been a threat.  There are others who I believe would be happy to live in isolation forever and would want to keep others in isolation too.  This pandemic has changed them; they are more who they were than ever before.
I’ve read somewhere, and maybe I’ve mangled it, that some believe that the fires of hell are just the light of God’s Eternal Truth.  The Truth burns away what is false within us and leaves our real selves behind. 
The Truth is not what we hear in the media, neither Fox nor MSNBC. The Truth is spoken in God’s language: In Nature, in our actions, in reality.  This Fire of Truth begins now and goes on long after we are dead. Do we let us consume us or do live in such a way to be in harmony with it?
That is a long way from getting a haircut.  But our lives are constructed from such things as getting haircuts like the drops of water in a river.  Right now a haircut would be to me like a drop of water on the tongue of a man in hell.
Well, maybe that is over-stating it a little bit, but you get the idea.  I’ve got an appointment.  Keep your fingers crossed.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )