There are these blazes that line the Appalachian Trail. If you stand at one blaze and look for the next, the intent is that you will be able to see the next. However, this is not always true. Perhaps one has worn off and so one would think that this would be a big problem. However, if you have ever walked a trail you know one thing to be profoundly true: others have walked the trail too. This is actually what makes a trail a trail. This is what gives it it’s trail-ness. Someone has gone before you. And so when the woods yield no blaze to follow, the steps of another are the thing that you lean into and trust.
Trust. People?
Yes, people are not the most secure thing to put your trust in. In fact they may be the worst thing to put your trust in. My dog is more faithful at times than I am even capable. However, I can’t have conversation with my dog. Well I could-and do but I always walk away wondering if it really meant as much to her. She was smiling the whole time but maybe it was because she can’t sweat and so she was just cooling down.
Anyway, I think that people will let us down, surely, but what if we knew that and still were willing to step out and trust allowing ourselves to be weak. Weak enough to need and in our neediness we do not seek life from the other-for life only comes from One. But maybe in trusting others we are actually trusting the life that flows through this person into the world. We are borrowing that confidence that blazed a new path that leads through the mountains of loneliness and apathy….
This is a latter note tacked on to this post two years from its origin:
Trusting people is an odd way to describe this whole blaze idea. I think I’d say it differently now-a-days. On the path there are plenty of peoples walking north. There is company on the way. We are all looking trusting that there will emerge a new, fresh, yet-to-be moment on the horizon that will pull us along into it history. It is the walkers job to walk then. To step forward in the hope and between moment that is the determinative space for life. Life happens between poles, between trees. And so we reflect and live and trust in the way God is making in this between-midbar-existance.
