I always pick the window seat. It’s an unspoken rule between me and myself. It was a late-night flight between somewhere and someplace, probably around 8pm on a February Sunday. The details of the flight itself are fuzzy to me; the experience is not. The cabin lights dimmed, and I lay my forehead against the plane window and flicked my eyes upward, just by chance. I’d never seen anything like it before. The entire galaxy was touchable, dotted, and magnificent: lit up like a refrigerator in the dead of night.
Lucky for me: there’s an app for that.
I pay a $2.99 monthly subscription to SkyView, an app that shows you where all the stars and planets are at all times. My smile grew as I realized the app still worked in Airplane Mode.
I learned about all the constellations, all the different stories unfolding in my little corner of the sky. Many of the bright shiny things I believed to be stars were actually planets.
Of course, I bring books and movies and music on planes, and I usually conk right out on any night flight. Here, though, it felt shameful to look away, even for a second. How could I not watch this before me, what a wasted thing it would be to deny the opportunity. I remember wishing I could put a frame around the whole sky and hang it in my kitchen.
And that is how I found God in seat 13F.
I know religion is this massive, amorphous thing, too tangled to unweave in Microsoft Word. Maybe I feel overwhelmed by the sheer size of it, and it feels easier to let it be what it is to me. I find God in the pasta aisle of the grocery store. I find God in lucky pennies on pavement, in the smell of firewood, in the photobooth prints of my friends and I at our eighth-grade graduation.
I read somewhere that when you ring God up for answers, it can feel like no one is on the receiving end. When I find a lucky penny, it’s an answer to my prayer the night before. I get so caught up in wanting to hear God speak into my mind (like Morgan Freeman) that I forget about the butterfly landing at my feet.
Sometimes God is the really small stuff. Actually, most of the time God is the really small stuff. The funny thing about life is, I guess, that the small staff is actually the big stuff.
My Senior year of college was a particularly turbulent one. There was a lot going on, and much of it was happening all at once. I didn’t find any lucky pennies that year, but it was probably because I felt so defeated that I stopped looking.
On a lukewarm April midnight, I booked a one-way flight home for the very next day. My Aunt Melanie had been diagnosed with late-stage cancer a couple years earlier, and despite her brilliant doctors and team, it wasn’t looking as good as it once was. My cousins are like sisters to me, and they were flying home to see their mom. I couldn’t not go. I wanted to say goodbye the way it’s meant to be said: never through the phone, always muffled in the shoulder of a hug.
I took two connecting flights, and I was scheduled to get in around early evening that day. The whole thing felt like a maddening dash to who knows what, to a dreary situation that I couldn’t fix.
I remember so clearly being 10 minutes away from landing in my hometown. I could see the city and the outline of the park, and woven between a few clouds was the most beautiful sunset I’d seen in a while. “That’s Melanie,” I thought to myself.
Sure enough, I ran to baggage claim to find my brother sitting around my luggage, waiting for me. “She just passed,” he said. “About 10 minutes ago.”
There’s a certain kind of feeling you get when it’s all too much, so you just feel nothing at all. I think it’s a self-preservation tactic. I walked into a house full of people who had just seen the worst thing happen, to a grandfather mourning his daughter, and it was just all too much. My eldest cousin, Chloe, hugged me, and in a moment of normalcy, complimented my butterfly earrings.
“Oh you know, I lost my hoops last night and I just threw these on to have something in my piercing,” I explained.
“Mom loved butterflies. Like, more than the average person. That was on purpose somehow,” she said.
The next day, we picked out an urn with butterfly engravings.
I found God in my $25 butterfly earrings and I found Melanie in a sun-soaked sky, 15,000 feet above Tulsa. In a way, I still feel like I got to say goodbye.
Tomorrow morning, I’ll probably find God in my Iced Vanilla Latte. I’ll go ahead and say an early thanks for that in my prayer tonight.
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