One of the better veggie burgers in town is served in a restaurant that shares two names, honoring the two restaurants that merged some years ago. Retaining both names meant creating a hybrid menu representing the best of both restaurants, so the selections range from burgers to an extensive assortment of Mexican dishes. Behind the restaurant is a popular hangout for young folks, where, before she became a well-known artist, the young singer, Jewel, would sing and strum.
Anticipating a veggie burger banquet, we entered the dual-name establishment, but suddenly sensed that something was amiss. Bright, jagged patterns of red and white stabbed the ceiling, displacing its usual drab comfort. An unexpected, inexplicable army of candy canes exploded above us, the display grabbing and gluing our eyeballs upward. Thousands of candy canes dangled from the ceiling, the beams, the air conditioning ductwork, the wiring.
What could be the meaning of this candy cane convention?
Gradually, the obvious dawned upon me: it was a holiday thing. The restaurant staff had taken a break from their bleak chores of battering chicken fried steak and eyeing and peeling potatoes, indulging instead in hanging cratefuls of holiday candy cane decorations in every hang-able niche.
The display was impressive. They hung from the rafters like inverted bats, awaiting their chance to fly.
Indeed, from beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, in the dark of night sometime after the setting of the sun and the welcome gloom of the moon, the world’s biggest urban bat colony emerges for their daily feeding. In one night alone, the 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats will consume 10,000 to 20,000 pounds of insects.
Unlike the unpredictable appearance of the restaurant candy canes, these bats are a permanent fixture, giving relief from an otherwise Moses-scale plague of insect life. We can only imagine the misery of living without this batty multitude, giving us an umbrella of bug protection.
Another far more ancient and intimidating population, a legion of invisible Heavenly Hosts, also invades our world. It moves without the candy cane flash of seasonal restaurant décor. It lacks the predictable routine and daily schedule by which an under-bridge bat colony is controlled.
Instead, encampments of the Angelic Community are neither regulated by temporary seasons of celebration, nor are they governed by the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon.
Their place above the rafters of our world, the firmament, is never ending. And in the moment of our greatest need, these sentinals are spirited as emissaries, so that in a crowded but often lonely world, we are not left alone.