The Plaza of the Americas in Dallas is an office building steadfastly yearning to be something greater. It comprises two office towers, a hotel, a shopping mall and, in the center, at the foot of a twenty-story atrium, an ice-skating rink. Giant prisms have been placed in strategic places to scatter sunlight in iridescent rainbows over shoppers and business travelers and office denizens moving this way and that. These various groups are easily identified by their neck-strung security badges, or their rolling travel cases, or their casual dress, ice-skates slung over preteen shoulders.

 

I was a little early for my appointed business, though not early enough to justify the lingering of which I partook there at the atrium floor overlooking the ice rink. I had an enormous cup of coffee, black, and was using it as pure stimulant, brain lubricant. I sat and watched and listened and tried to remain as silent as possible.

 

One of the most wonderful things about loving God is the ability it gives you to love the God in other people. I've spent inordinate time of late thinking about other people and the magnificence that is the seed of God's love expressed through each of us. Billions of people--good, bad, and indifferent--and each with a holy seed within, each pair of lips and eyes anointed with the creative touch of a divine kiss. To look at a crowd of people with love is a wondrous thing. We're not used to looking at crowds this way, as overflowing with blessing and possibility. We're conditioned to avoid crowds, to see them as dehumanizing and impersonal. This is certainly how I've always viewed them. But a new way of seeing is slowly opening up to me, one in which each hair on each head is counted and treasured.

 

To watch strangers ice skate is to witness the joy, tragedy, comedy, and folly that is the pageant of humanity. One stumbles and falls, cursing under his breath. One struggles gamely to remain upright and succeeds, only to crash headlong into a wall. One glides by with the grace of an angel, does a turn, skates backward, her arms and legs moving with the musicality of a string quartet, creating beauty out of nothing, out of thin air; a prayer in motion. Still others move wearily in circles as though they can think of nothing better to do, looking as though they wished to be somewhere else, doing something else, if only they could think of what that might be. As if the miracle and wonder of metal blades sliding across a microscopic film of water over ice were simply a way to kill time.

 

I watched as a girl of ten or eleven worked out the mechanics of skating backward. She beamed, thrilled, and waved to her mother who sat at a table across the rink from me. "Mom, look!" the girl shouted, and her mother waved, smiling with delight. A look of unabashed joy and pride on the face of an eleven-year-old girl is rare and is a lovely thing to behold.

 

It occurred to me that ice skating is a lovely metaphor for creation. No really . . . hear me out. Why does anyone go ice skating? It serves no useful purpose, has no end in itself except to create joy and beauty where before there was only a cold, flat plane. Why did God create the universe? Could it have been for a similar reason? Simply to experience the joy of creating something from nothing, the pride of learning and growing despite the cold and the potential for hurt? I think we are most like God when we are transported in the act of creating to that place in the human psyche where our creativity simply flows out of us. Call it "inspiration", call it "being in the zone", call it whatever you like, but it is at those moments when we are moving not simply to get around the circle, but actively extracting joy and beauty and purpose where before there was only empty space, when we are most illuminated, most blessed.

 

The backwards-skating girl fell unceremoniously on her ass, and started to laugh. Someone else--a friend, perhaps, or an older sister--circled around and held out a hand. Deftly, the taller girl drew the fallen skater to her feet and they embraced, laughing. And I whispered, "Yes, that too."