Defining Moment

We all have those moments in life where we can remember exactly what we were doing at a given instant. For example, we remember where we were when Kennedy was assassinated, where we watched the first men walking on the moon, and what we were doing when the twin towers fell.

These are moments that change our thinking. They change our perception of the world around us.

I sat with my Dad and my brother in front of the black and white TV to watch Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the moon’s surface. We were allowed to stay up late that night to watch history being made.

When the planes hit the twin towers, I was at home, not having to work that day. My mother called me and told me that it was like the world just ended. I turned on the TV in time to watch the second plane hit the tower and stayed glued to the TV screen for the rest of the day.

I actually saw the Challenger explode in real-time, looking up at the sky in the parking lot of Bennigan’s in Orange Park, Florida. I had seen many launches, living in Florida, but that was the first time I saw one EXPLODE. I instantly burst into tears and stood in the parking lot for several minutes absorbing the impact of the event, tears steadily streaming down my face. I knew before the commentators on TV told us that Challenger was gone.

Defining moments.

The day I realized that the universe is bigger and there is much more going on than I previously thought was a day in college in a botany class. The professor brought in a stereoscope for us to play with. She put a daisy on the plate and let us look at the wonders. It was an ordinary daisy, with white petals and a yellow center. I don’t remember the magnification the professor had the stereoscope set on, but when I looked in the eyepieces, I saw a miniature world that I didn’t know existed.

My brain told me that the fuzzy stuff in the flower’s center was simple little stalks or spikes that were covered in pollen. I had no clue that on top of each of the stalks was a tiny daisy. Duplicates of the parent plant. I could see the pollen grains, but the small flowers were a total surprise. A shock wave of understanding that I would never forget.

That moment, the universe shifted and I knew there was so much more going on than I could have ever imagined. Those miniature flowers expanded my world far beyond the limits of my previous thought processes. I physically felt my brain shift its direction about 60 or 80 degrees.

I realized that God was real if He could create something so perfect as a thousand tiny flowers inside a larger flower. I realized that human eyes were extremely limited and I needed to observe the world with a stereoscope of understanding. I knew that I had many more things to learn and I was not the self-professed genius I fancied myself being.

The world became much larger, which meant my brain got so much smaller and I had to do something about that.