Specks Of Dust

Melville H. Nahin, 33°

The Volume of Sacred Law states, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Can one believe the Creator stopped there?

On Sunday last, I was reading the newspaper and a bit of sunlight peaked through the otherwise cloudy skies. Suddenly, I noticed those shimmering particles gracefully dancing in the sunlight. It is easy to spot the dust that seems to collect just moments after the furniture has been cleaned, but in the air, it is only noticeable once in a while, when the light is streaming in from outside and hits the dust particles at just the right angle. Nevertheless, those dust particles are always there even though one’s spouse may be the greatest of housekeepers -- and indeed mine is.

Often, like the ever-present but infrequently seen dust particles in the air around us, we do not notice the influence and involvement of Providence in our personal lives and the world. Still, sometimes we do recognize that the most strange things happen, and at those moments it’s as if the stream of sunlight is shining on the glimmering specks at just the right angle. We see and understand what we didn’t notice before. For instance, I believe that nothing, absolutely nothing in this world happens by chance or coincidence. Every event, great or small, has the fingerprint of something beyond on it whether we realize it or not.

Often these incidents and the heightened awareness they bring happen when we least expect it, and oftentimes they are so trivial that we don’t even notice them for what they are.

You’re running an errand for a friend and are late as well. Suddenly, just as you approach, a car pulls out of a parking space in the area where you can never find an opening.

A friend has moved to another location, and you’ve lost his address and phone number. Then, just as you are about to give up finding the scrap of paper on which you wrote the new phone number and address, suddenly there it is in plain sight where you have looked several times before.

You’re driving in a car, thirsty as anything, on a rather warm day but with nothing to drink. All at once, you remember the bottle of spring water that rolled out of the shopping bag the other day. It had slipped under the seat, and you hadn’t bothered to retrieve it when you unloaded the rest of the groceries.

A neighbor’s toddler squirms out of her stroller and falls headfirst into a pile of leaves your children just raked together. They make a perfect soft landing for the child.

Are these incidents really coincidental? Or are they hints that Providence is taking an interest in our lives?

Like the air-borne, usually invisible particles of dust, these things are always there. They often seem unimportant, but are they not a constant reminder of an Eternal Presence in our lives?

Aren’t they a constant reminder that, if we are willing to recognize their true source, we will acknowledge something more important in our lives than our everyday concerns and complaints? We’ll recognize that someplace, somewhere, somehow, all life was created by and is still guided by a force outside our knowledge to comprehend, but not outside our ability to believe.

We are taught in Freemasonry’s First Degree, quoting from the Volume of Sacred Law that “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Can one truly believe the Creator stopped there?