MountainWings       A MountainWings Moment
#3318              Wings Over The Mountains of Life



The Smell of Realization
==================

We are in Scottsdale Arizona.

C. Elijah, James and I are on vacation.  We are three brothers
in ministry who decided to take a vacation together each year.
This year we chose to go to the desert, Phoenix, Arizona.

We arrived on Monday and checked into our hotel.  It was a
typical day.  When we came back to the hotel after dinner,
there was a smell in the air like an electrical fire.

"What's that smell," asked James, "something's burning."

"Maybe it's someone burning wood in the fireplace," I said.
Our room had a fireplace so it was likely someone was burning
logs.  The thing was, it didn't smell like logs burning.

"Maybe it's coming from California," C. Elijah answered.

"Do you know how far away that is?" I said, knowing that
we were hundreds of miles away and that couldn't be the source.

When we left the hotel the next morning, the electrical burning
smell was still in the air.  We went to the other side of the
city, the smell was still there.

"That couldn't be the same fireplace," someone remarked,
"something is burning in the city."

The next day we moved to a different city, to the The Meridian
Condos in Scottsdale, Arizona.

As we got out of the car and walked to the office with the
awesome background of the mountains around us, our noses
twitched as the same electrical burning smell laced the air.

As the clerk gave us our keys, I asked him, "What's that burning
smell?  It was in Phoenix and the same smell is in Scottsdale."

"That's from the fires in San Diego."

My mind reeled.

From San Diego!  How in the world could that be?  When we got in
the car, I punched in route to San Diego in the portable GPS unit
that I had to see exactly how far it was to San Diego.

After a minute of calculating, the GPS flashed,

371 miles!

Smoke was traveling from 371 miles away.
Smoke so strong that it made our noses wrinkle.

371 miles away!

It was a MountainWings Moment.

Sure, I knew about the fires in California, I had even published
a subscriber's story about the fires.
http://www.mountainwings.com/past/3301.htm

I knew ...but I didn't know.

Stories in the news are abstract.
We intellectually know them, but we don't know them in our soul.
It is distant, abstract, and in the back of our minds perhaps
not as bad as the news makes it sound.

My nose wrinkled from the acrid smell of fires 371 miles away.

"What must it be like in San Diego?" I thought.

Many of the things in the world,
the agonies,
the heartbreaks,
the hunger,
the war,
the fear,
the hate,
the strife,
the injustices,
the prejudice,
the uncertainty of job future,
the fear of a medical diagnosis,
the concern for a wayward child,
the violent, intoxicated, or unfaithful spouse,
the long list of things that for some seem so far away,
we don't realize the full truth,
until the smell of realization hits our noses.

Then it becomes real.

Believe me people, it is real, whether you realize it or not.
Whether your senses are bombarded with it or not.

It is real.

You can't help every situation.
You can't champion every cause.
You are limited in what you can do.

But you can do something,
for someone,
everyday.

Because everyone, everywhere, everyday,
has fires in one form or another
to put out,

whether you can smell them or not.


~A MountainWings Original~


Other issues relating to the California wildfires:
http://www.mountainwings.com/past/3301.htm
http://www.mountainwings.com/past/3319.htm
http://www.mountainwings.com/past/3320.htm


Thank you for inviting MountainWings in your mailbox.
See you tomorrow.