Exploring

Every kid ought to have woods to explore – every adult too.

Three months ago, when my husband and I moved to a new home, we got woods.

For several weeks, whenever heading out walking, I stuck to the streets. That provided enough scenery, I told myself. Sure, the neighborhood promotional materials boasted walking trails, but the one trail I saw veered off the street, around a small lake and disappeared into the wild.

Passing the trail, I looked longingly but didn’t go there until the day my adventurer husband suggested we walk it together. In his boyhood, he had woods. Now, he heard again, too strong to deny, a call to explore.

We set out walking along the road, then turned onto the trail – a wide, graveled, four-wheeler path. A low iron gate barred larger vehicles from entering. Stepping over the gate, we trekked past two small lakes, the second lake hidden from the main road. Visions of fishing excursions danced in my husband’s head.

Curving, the path took us behind the main row of houses in the neighborhood. Looking one way, we saw back yards of relatively new houses. Looking the other way, we saw wilderness. Eventually, we also saw a green metal building sitting far from a paved road. A sign advertised the building as a motorcycle repair shop. Near it, sat a wooden, one-story house with front porch – perhaps 1940’s vintage.

Just past a second gate, we stepped onto a narrow, paved trail that made an oblong loop through a field, taking us close to a main road before curving back around to the second gate.

Returning the way we had come, we noticed where secondary paths meandered away from the four-wheeler trail and determined to explore those paths another day.

Two weeks later, we explored again, this time cross-country. Our house sits on a hill. The back yard slopes down to a ravine where a little creek runs and woods begin. Beyond the ravine, the land slopes sharply uphill again.

On a Saturday morning, I decided to pick up trash that had blown into the ravine. My husband said, “What if I come too, and we go see what’s over the rise?”

Brunt and Brunt doesn’t carry quite the same ring as Lewis and Clark. Yet, we felt just as much explorers as they. Fording the creek, walking under tall, leafless trees, climbing past fallen trunks, low entangling branches and vines that hadn’t yet budded, we topped the ridge. Another four-wheeler trail ran along its far side.

We walked the trail in both directions until stopped by water holes too large to cross. Then, we returned home, picking our way back down the hill, crossing the ravine and promising ourselves we would return another day to explore further.

Only later did I read the words God spoke after Abraham moved to a new place: “Take a walk in every direction and explore the new possessions I am giving you” (Gen. 13:17 NLT).

Only later did I read the call to a different kind of exploring in Galatians 6:4, The Message: “Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that.”

How satisfying to explore the new place we live! How deeply enjoyable to gain perspective, to discover together much we otherwise would have missed.

How wild – at my age – to hear a call, too strong to deny, to explore who I am. Eager, yet afraid to go there, I hesitate, until he who created me says, “What if I go with you?”

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.