This is Sacred
On Monday I was graced with a holy privilege. Those are jargony words, I know, and so I prefer not to use them very often, but this moment needs a special language, it needs high and divine words. I was on my bicycle, pedaling home from work to my house, where a large truck was in the middle of the street in front of our section of the curb, surrounded by all the kids from the street. “This is awesome!” came racing from the mouth of my nine year old son, and it came rushing from his heart, too, I could tell by the excitement with which he yelled it. Two men, one in a blaze-orange t-shirt and the other in a bright yellow vest, were busy at work near the back of a flatbed trailer attached to the truck. The one in the orange shirt drove a three wheeled fork-lift, the kind that you’ve seen hanging off the back of a semi-truck ambling down the highway, its third little wheel spinning like it wants to come off. The man drove the fork-lift with magic and grace: he navigated it at speed through the narrowest of gaps between a neighbor’s parked car and the rear of the trailer, he danced that fork-lift like he was made for it, like it was made for him. The yellow-vested man directed the show, orchestrating the dance as though he had choreographed it himself, and he had, from years of practiced experience. The man dancing the fork-lift waltzed it to the trailer, impossibly smoothly poked the fork blades into the open spaces in a palette, levitated the palette on a breeze over to the curb, stood the lift at attention using some kind of hydraulic something-or-others on the front, and silently deposited the palette into its spot in the yard as the neighbor kids applauded with awe. The man in the yellow vest prepped the next palette without prompting, moving in sync with the fork-lift, always out of the way just in time, always fluid, always flowing. The two men in concert off-loaded the palettes stacked with pink-wrapped shingles to music only they could hear, to steps only they knew and only they could see. And we all watched, and what we saw was grace and beauty: two men, made good and true, living their gifts with skill, a holy moment. And what we all witnessed as we watched was the image of God, as these two men, in the words of one artist, did little things with great love.
My son named their work on that Monday evening, and I don’t know in what way I would have seen it had he not been there to name it the way he did. But I know I saw it the way I did because my son, in confidence, named it awesome: daddy, this is awesome. Which is his way, I know, of saying: daddy, this is sacred.
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