Diary of the Blood Moon September 27, 2015

I wrote this in September for a friend whose momentary affliction prevented him from seeing what we all were able to witness on the night of the blood moon. I wrote this piece in a descriptive manner so that someone without physical sight could imagine and develop mental pictures of the scenes that unfolded that night.

The first time I saw the moon Sunday night was about 9:00 PM, and I forgot it was going to be a blood moon. I was working at my kitchen sink, which faces east, and when I looked out the window over my sink, The moon’s bright light was shining through the tree limbs in front of my window. I couldn’t see the moon’s outline because it was obscured by the trees -- I could only see its brilliant, clear, white light shining through the foliage.

The moon that night started in the eastern sky and moved to the southern horizon. It wasn’t long before it came out of its hiding spot behind the trees, and paraded itself out in the open sky for us. The next time I looked out the kitchen window, I could see the whole beautiful full white moon. It loomed so large on the horizon, and it gave off such a pure, bright, white light, that I called Mike in to come look at it. All the round edges of the moon were visible and crisp against the inky black sky, and there were no clouds to obscure its beauty.

The next time I looked at the moon, it was around 9:25 PM when my mom texted me to tell me about the lunar eclipse. Mike and I went outside to watch it. The sky was still clear and black like velvet, and the stars looked like thousands of tiny twinkling diamonds spread out across a black backdrop. The moon was still white, but it looked smaller now, and it was still suspended in the southeastern sky. As I watched the moon, I started to see a bluish aura along the left side of it, but maybe it was just my contact lenses because Mike couldn’t see it!

Soon after that, the real excitement began! It wasn’t long before  we saw a dark shadow starting to creep across the moon from its left side. It seemed to happen slowly and quickly all at once. You couldn’t actually see the movement of the intruding shadow, but when we went inside for ten minutes, then went back outside to look, the difference was dramatic. i do remember initially being a little disappointed by the fact that the shadow wasn’t red. As it turns out, I just hadn’t waited long enough!

The gray-brown shadow kept growing slowly across the moon. All the while, God kept the clouds away so everyone could see His glory, the majesty of His creation, and His power over  the earth and heavens. The winds and the waves, and the sun and the moon obey Him even today.

I suppose the shadow must have been about halfway across the left side of the moon when all at once I saw it! The shadow was taking on a decidedly red cast! Now THIS was more what I had been expecting!

It was such an interesting effect! The far left side of the moon was a dark, deep gray color that gradually bled into a smoky reddish-orange toward the middle of the moon. All the while, the bottom right corner formed a crescent of bright white. I’m not sure the thin little crescent ever got swallowed  up in the eclipse.

I tried to take a picture with the camera on my phone, which is a very good camera-- for a phone. I had to enlarge the picture by 20% to make the moon big enough to see. When I did, my camera picked up red cloudy-looking splotches all around the sky that I could not see with my naked eye. I’m not sure what that was, but it was dramatic and mysterious.

The left side of the moon just kept getting darker and darker until we could no longer decipher where the moon stopped and the sky started. It blended from black on the left into a black-red blood color in the middle, until finally all but the tiny crescent on the right was eclipsed. That must have been around 9:30. We came inside for about ten minutes, and when I went outside next, I saw something amazing. The moon was completely gone!

In those ten minutes while I was inside, white cottony clouds had moved in, stretched thinly across the sky, beautifully and evenly, with pieces of dark sky still showing in between them. I’m not sure if the eclipse hid the moon, or if the clouds obscured it, but the it was gone and I couldn’t find it anywhere.

A symphony of white clouds painted over the velvety black sky looked at once amazing and odd. Odd because I’d never seen it look like that before. Amazing for the same reason. The clouds stayed white in spite of the black sky, and that’s what I think was so intriguing. The best illustration I can think of to describe how the sky looked right then is if you could imagine a cotton Halloween spiderweb laid evenly over a plush piece of black velvet. That’s what the sky looked like where I live. The clouds were evenly distributed and the moon and all the millions of points of starlight were gone.

The eclipse was supposed to be finished by 10:51 PM, but the moon never showed itself again. That’s okay because we got to see most of it.

It was a night that made me feel like the Lord could have come back right that very moment. It was beautiful and supernatural and a little scary, too. A perfect night for His return. I halfway expected to be raptured right then and there. If that had happened, I wouldn’t have Parkinson’s now. Until then, we’ll stay rooted and grounded, right?!