Last night my two high school spinal injuries were talking to me, keeping me awake past the normal cut off point for my day.  I counted sheep … well, no, I didn’t.  I am lying.  I read Facebook and Twitter and such.  No likes. No dice.  Still awake.  Then I decided to fire up an HBO movie in bed with my AppleTV unit.  Was that Costner?  Some detective show was just about to suck me in, when the picture froze, the scene buffered, and I began to curse AT&T Uverse Wi-Fi for the poor reception way back in the bedroom.

Naturally, I headed to the kitchen to see what’s to eat.

I haven’t had this house that long, but I have committed to memory the twists and turns from bed to fridge without the need of lights.  So I stumbled on to the other end of the house in the dark, happy that Texas is having a spell of warm weather, and my boxer shorts are all I need.

When I got to the kitchen, the first thing I noticed was the clock on the microwave.  The time was 12:34 … not that late, but wait … Perhaps there was significance.  12:34 … That’s 1-2-3-4 … I was looking at a digital clock, rather than the grandfather clock that had just chimed in the other room.

“Why is 1-2-3-4 significant?,” you might ask. Well … my friend … I will share.  Not too many years ago, I dated a sweet, beautiful woman who told me a story about a mutual friend.  The mutual friend is a young, wise, charismatic pastor in North Texas, and she relayed a story about one of his sermons.  A sermon I didn’t hear, but her account stuck with me.

This pastor stumbled upon a little coincidence — coincidence, those funny things that I like to refer to as “God’s sense of humor.”  The pastor’s name is Jim … Jim Mann.  Well, Pastor Jim noticed something unusual about clocks and wrote a sermon about it.  It seems, he kept looking at his clocks at random moments, and noticing the time always seemed to be interesting combinations of numbers.

What did it mean?

Mann would look up during a meeting and notice that lunch was almost an hour away, because the clock displayed 11:11 … or 1-1-1-1.  Another day, Mann would just happen to notice it was 3:33 or 3-3-3, time to take his daughter to soccer practice or whatever.  And maybe he noticed the time practice was over, at 5-5-5 …

You get it.

So anyway, Pastor Jim mulled this over and thought there must be some reason … that God must be telling him something in His ever mysterious, miraculous ways.  I don’t know if Mann ever was able to put his finger on whatever it was … but he came up with a great idea and put it in a sermon.

Mann encouraged his congregation to pray for him at all times, but specifically whenever they see one of those numeric combinations as described above.  Since hearing that story, I have prayed for and/or thought of Jim Mann just about every time I see that it is 2:22 or whatever.

So … last night, at 1-2-3-4, I immediately thought of Jim Mann.  Sorry Jim.  I don’t think I prayed, because I had my mind already “meditating” on the feast of whatever was inside the fridge.

Just as I was about to open the door, I noticed another light.  A light from above … I swear to God, so to speak.  On the tiled floor, near the refrigerator was a square “box” of light, illuminating a couple of square feet of my floor.  It was just about the same place the bright light normally hits the floor, when I open the fridge in the dark.  But the door was closed, and this mysterious light was more subtle … more natural … than what the fridge put out in the dark.

“What the heck?,” replaced my thoughts of 1-2-3-4.  “Where is the light coming from?”  I had never seen this light before.  I looked up.  Ah … I didn’t build this house, and I didn’t put the unusual skylight above the center of the kitchen.  Light was coming in through the skylight and leaving its evidence on the floor.  But wait.  I haven’t seen this before.  There is no street light close enough to shine in through the skylight.

Looking up again, I took a step to the side, centered, and saw one of the brightest, biggest full moons I have seen in months.  It was the first moon — of any phase — I had ever seen through the kitchen skylight.  (Ha … of course I will be watching for them from now on, throwing private little watching parties in my kitchen … I digress …)

Ha … I wondered if the builders had any idea that the moon would ever be visible.  My imagination — after many a year reading National Geographic features about ancient structures designed to track the movement of the heavenly bodies — went wild.  Ha … and now I have discovered that my own house has a built in “watcher of the skies” feature.  How fun!

So … from now on, when there is a full moon, I will be reloading my ice cream bowl in the dark, standing there, waiting … waiting on the cold tile floor, looking up into the skies, through the skylight … searching for that special astronomical  event … that kitchen anomaly …that celestial phenomena that will forever be known in my house as The Jim Moon.

Know what I sayin?