I had one of those experiences when I was vacationing in Montana with friends a while back. My host was living in a small house that was part of a livestock ranch on the Yellowstone River. (The river was just 30 yards from the back door.) One night, right around dusk, we were making dinner and I happened to glance up through the glass doors and see a platinum blonde mule looking in at me. He saw me and bolted away. “Hey, what is that mule doing out by the back deck?” I called to my friend. “Oh crap, they’ve escaped again…!” Apparently the ranch owners were out of town and their two clever mules were up to antics. Three of us raced outside to try to block access to the road, but two mules had already raced down the driveway and made it out onto the highway that went past the ranch. (A highway with semis and a speed limit of 75 mph.) I grabbed a couple of lead ropes and Chuck got his van and we drove after the escapees.
Fortunately they had not dawdled on the road, but had run up to a neighbor’s barn just a mile up the road. With the neighbor’s help, we caught them and by that point, it was dark. I told Chuck, “You follow behind us with your flashers on and we will walk them home on the shoulder.”
We did exactly that, with two of us leading the escaped mules and Chuck driving behind us with the emergency flashers on, and fortunately the truckers slowing down going past us. I looked up at one point to see an enormous full moon rising up over the mountains, which turned the blacktop road into silver glitter and the mountains looked like black paper cut out for a stage set. It literally took my breath away that I had been transported into this surreal moment where I was walking a runaway blond mule beside a silver highway in that extraordinary scenery under that huge glowing moon. We got back to Chuck’s house, put the mules back in their pasture, then looked at each other and said, “Did that really just happen?!”
We need peak or mountaintop moments to give us a resolve when we have to push through the mundane tasks and obligations that form most of our lives. If you do not have the emotional experience that results in joy or awe, an emotional language, how can you understand or imagine a concept like heaven?
good story!!!