At our first Sunset Celebration Wednesday July 15, Glenn told a moving story adapted from a story by Dr. Fred Craddock. When I was a young boy every summer I spent a week or two at my grandparents’ home where I enjoyed pleasant summer evenings gathering fallen stars. As I think back on it, the spent stars were worthless, but it was something to do. My brothers and I would go into a field near the house, climb up on tree stumps (all that remained after the blight of a once-beautiful chestnut grove), and wait for stars to fall. From these perches we could see exactly where they fell, and it was not uncommon to have our pockets filled within an hour. Sometimes, whether in greed or out of compassion for fallen stars that might otherwise go unnoticed, we would sneak Grandma’s clothes basket from the back porch and harvest the remaining stars still flickering on the ground. And sometimes, dragging the heavy basket home left us too tired to empty it. “We will do it in the morning,” we would say, but in the morning, Grandma would wake us up fussing about a residue of gray ashes in her clothes basket. (Everyone knows you cannot save stars over until the next night.”) We denied charges of having kindled a fire in her basket and snickered off to play, protected from punishment by the mystery. But during her last illness, Grandma called me to her bedside and told me, almost secretively, that she knew what we had been doing with her clothes basket. My guilty silence was broken by her instruction for me to bring to her a package wrapped in newspaper from the bottom of an old chest. I obeyed and then waited the eternity it took for her arthritic fingers to open the bundle. “Oh, it’s gone.” She said showing me where it had been. In the bottom of the package was a little residue of gray ashes. We stared at each other. “You too Grandma? Why didn’t you tell me?” “I was afraid you would laugh at me. And why didn’t you tell me?” “I was afraid you would scold me.” We are blessed by the mysteries of everyday life. May we never be too afraid or too embarrassed to celebrate those mysteries as gifts from God.