It takes a certain kind of person to say what it is you know to be true with the kind of language that makes you feel as if you are hearing it for the first time. Your world will either scatter or in some beautiful way begin to be put back together. I was back in Lansing not to long ago and ran into a friend I had not seen for some time. She and I had preaching class together and a number of others but in this class I remember really getting to know her. It was probably because we had the opportunity to teach one another in the class and there ends up being a whole lot you end up coming to know about a person when they open themselves to be a student or a teacher. Also we had an ongoing joke between the two of use about cats. Weird I know.
My friend is beyond the age of my mother and someone who has spoken some heavy trues into my life. She saw me and we were both surprised to see each other late at our former school in the dinning hall. We caught up a bit and then perhaps with some clues taken from my massive beard she said, “you’ve been in a kind of wilderness.” My heart sunk for a few moments as her language hit on the head the very thing I had known but not understood or given language to. As I described relationship and moving and study and the struggle to love in brief form, she took my narrative of the past year and said well… “this is what that is”. Wilderness is less about metaphor and more about experiential narrative. But I can’t wait to get home sometimes.
Like when I am out on a ride and I have gone one way down hill and have turned back because I don’t have water and I’m weak and crawling and wondering what the view is from the top. I am learning though that there is no top. Perhaps there is an emotional and even physical top but the whole of this expedition is up hill and in the words of Christina Rosseti it ‘winds up hill all the way’. So I plan to stay hydrated and feel the burn and breathe deep and get all streamline as the hills afford me a dangerous grade. Because its a bearded wilderness journey with the seeds of an epic brewing that feels most honest.
