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Into The Woods (Part 29)

Sitting in the dirt, leaning against the massive tree limb that just ambushed today’s journey, I read the slip of paper once more  -- for I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ -- then let it drop from my hand. I stare at it on the ground and remember when he gave it to me; I hadn’t believed him that it would help. I wonder if he believed in me when he gave it to me or if he was simply doing what he was supposed to do.

I mumble into the distance, “God, if you’re there . . . I need a way to believe.”

Pushing myself to my feet, I brush the woods from my scrapped elbows and knees then retie my tennis shoes. My backpack in place and my gaze set ahead, I begin . . . again. After several steps, I go back to the tree limb, pick up the paper and shove it in my pocket.

The woods are puffy and tawny with daylight, the kind that’s too bright to see well in the dark areas and too dim to do much good anywhere else. It seems I’ve been lost such a long, long time but that I’ve been here such a short time. This portion of the woods is stiff and constraining, each step a grinding shade of gray shooting up my legs. I can’t do this. I take another step and my foot twists deep into the sodden decomposition of the forest. This is what I can’t do. I pull myself forward, past a throne bush, ducking under low hanging branches. I can’t do this anymore.

This. Everyone has their own this. That grisly thing that’s turning them, twisting and ringing them toward an escape. Paul’s this was a prison term; someone else’s this might be a wandering through the woods. But I wonder, if this is this hard now, what will I feel like at fifty years old? Or twenty pounds overweight? Or facing a terminal illness? All while waiting for this to turn on its heel and . . . what does that paper say again?

 I reach in my pocket and pull out the slip of paper, reading it again – I appreciate your willingness to continue the journey despite the struggle, to me this is a good indicator that you can continue to make progress -- I shove my hand back into my pocket. There’s nothing else there. His handwriting is the same but the message is different. I look behind. He isn’t there. I look above and around. He’s nowhere. I read it again . . . he believes I can do this.

“When we face the worst that can happen in any situation, we grow. When circumstances are at their worst, we can find our best.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004)

Into The Woods (Part 28)

This morning the moon sits right outside the morning, watching everything, reluctant to move on, to give up the day to the sun. Those first, tender moments of dawn are so telling. When the celestial crescent retreats, bowing to the blaze of a fresh day, I know the moments ahead will hold feeble, halting steps for me. But, when that beautiful orb fills the morning with itself, refusing to turn away from the splendor of the day, I know I have an equal chance of facing a day filled with calloused courage.

And this morning the moon was being more than stubborn. As the sun rose, pushing it aside, it was hanging on by a thread.

“What’s the thread?” I had asked him many, many months ago.

He looked at me with a quizzical eye.

“The thread in my dream.” I explained. “I was dangling by a thin thread over a deep, black abyss. What’s the thread?”

“The thread is a thread of hope.”

He answered as if he hadn’t had to think about it at all.

Of course he would say that. Had I really expected him to say anything different?

I stand, throwing my backpack on my shoulder and join hands with the fading moon, deciding I will follow in his defiant steps this day.

Within hours my gutsy, heavenly inspiration is gone and the burning of the day mires my steps and my will. The woods are itchy and swollen with one hindrance after another.

Once again I feel discouragement settle inside of me like cement.

I see a small hedge of trees in the distance, some shade, a place to rest. As I step over a fallen tree limb, my shoe lace catches and I dive toward the ground, face first. My shoelace is tangled on the limb; both legs are sliced and bloody.

Hot, angry tears move through my body and out my eyes.

“I hate these stupid woods.”

I untangle my shoelace and kick at the fallen tree limb until my energy is spent, then reach in my pocket for a tissue. My fingers find a piece of paper instead. The paper he gave me over a year ago.

"For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ."

“My this.” I whisper. I had forgotten . . . forgotten why I had come into the woods in the first place – to find my 'this.'

Maybe it isn’t too late.

Meet Bill

 

 

If you havn't met Bill . . .

         read the story Meet Bill.

Into The Woods (Part 27)

I used to stand in doorways and wonder where I was going. There are no doorways here.

These woods have lumber, wilds, and the middle of nowhere. But no doorways.

At first he is very still, immobile, looking past me. Seeing repudiation on his florid, placid face, watching him turn away, listening to his silence, leaves me alone, without a doorway. My soul unoccupied, left cold, me in the woods.

I remember living in a place as a kid with thin and worn carpet. It was a vacant, brown house incapable of feeling like a home because there were creatures – in the basement, in my bedroom, everywhere. Varmint that I couldn’t see. Deep inside the walls. I could hear them scratching. Behind doors the gnawing echoed. Inside cabinets the scurrying screeched, turning me to stone more than once.

I walked on top of the furniture, jumping from chair to couch. In the kitchen, I remained frozen at the breakfast table. The rowdy critters crowded my senses with the need to run through doorways, darting from room to room, ensuring that I end up on top of a bed, a chair, a table, as if the floor were on fire.

The noise of these things left me with the feeling that worse things were coming. Something worse than the sound they could make.

 As running through doorways turned to lingering, fear began to stir and stagnate.

I stop in the cancer doorway, waiting for the word remission. Whatever that means. It doesn’t mean gone.

Impaled with dread, I hesitate in the misery doorway, waiting for respite. That could mean a place where my real laugh is different from this one.

I tarry in the faith doorway, waiting for mercy. If that means help and care, I’m not sure where it will come from.

The angle of the sun makes the woods look shallower this morning.

I push my moleskin into my backpack. It’s time to go.

My steps drag through the woods; the onward motion leaving me fixed in doorways.

The Vessel Project

Today I have been honored to have a devotion featured on The Vessel Project: So-Alone, Found and Wanted. Check it out.