Moving On

Sometimes there is no explanation.

Only a need to retreat, to quit the lodgings of one world and take up residence in another.

Sometimes the walls close in and the cracks in the foundation are laid bare. And you try renovating, but there’s asbestos all through it. Perhaps you’ve built up too much in the way of stuff here anyway, and it’s hard to choose what to keep and what to toss. So you leave it all behind.

The first few steps are hesitant, as if to test the sanity of it all. Will the house itself reach out and pull you back? Will your heart break for the memories in gilded frames? And then an old song drifts up from your youth, the song of the baptists stepping into the water. No turning back.

And you actually laugh for relief. This is not your address. It never was.

The sun bounds up above the horizon, bright and blinding. Everything makes sense in the morning of the third day. And you begin to run, upstream and to the east, to the headwaters you’ve never yet seen. And a straight and narrow path opens up before you, and if you can just reach the doorstep, you know you’ll be ok.

Weak, fainting, crazy, crying, doesn’t matter how you get there. It’s home. Not of your own making, but His.

Perhaps there’s an explanation after all, foolish and straightforward though it may be.

But I’ll be the King’s fool over any other.

And I’ll be a doorkeeper, or the sparrow in her nest, or even the ashes beneath the altar. I’ll trade my thousand nights and mornings for this one day. Here I’ll die and here I’ll live.

~lg

S.D.G.