I just finished reading a book called Death on the Barrens, a harrowing--and true--tale of challenge, survival, and redemption on an 1955 canoe expedition through the Canadian Barrens, one of the least traveled wilderness areas on the planet.  It is the story of an ambitious canoe expedition gone wrong and how those who survived (the leader died) made their way back to civilization.  Much has been written about the mistakes the canoeists made and how the expedition may have been doomed from the start, but my intent here is to not dwell on those but on the journey of heart the author, George James Grinnell, makes as he finds his way back to inner normalcy.
     His quest was not an easy one.  Along the way, he married four times, lost all three of his sons in a canoeing accident, and found income but not always fulfillment in teaching at a Canadian university.  Today, Mr. Grinnell is eighty years old and, as he tells it, his mind still wanders back to the days of the expedition when "love bathed his soul in the waters of inner peace."  For him, the expedition, despite nearly killing him, is the high point of his life.  He will never experience a time like it again.  It is what brain researchers call a "flashbulb" memory, one of those memories that enlarge and illuminate life in unforgettable ways.
     We all need those flashbulb memories, really, those moments of reality that mark and mold us in ways that other moments do not, those slices of experience that leave us profoundly and, we hope, forever changed.  Like George Grinnell, we often endure much to find them, but we rarely regret them in the end.  They change our lives.
     What is your flashbulb memory?  Ponder it, treasure it, be in awe over it; rejoice in life's ability to deliver such profundity in a broken existence.  Marvel that in the midst of a seemingly cold and indifferent universe life shines and love reigns.
     God is there.