I sat outside a Starbucks with a view of Pike’s Peak.
Earlier I’d met my sister Judy for lunch at her workplace, the International Bible Society headquarters in Colorado Springs. While waiting for Judy in the small bookstore/lobby, I found a French New Testament for sale.
Opening the pages and scanning a few verses, I actually recognized several words. By the time Judy arrived, I’d decided to purchase.
Our younger daughter speaks French fluently. Thirty-five years ago, I took French in college. Last year, I enrolled in a seven-week conversational French course. The class provided just enough information to frustrate me – and to entice me to learn more.
In the months after, enticement got buried under a pile of daily responsibilities and activities.
Sitting alone outside Starbucks, I drank iced mocha, enjoyed the sunshine, admired the snow-laced peak and thought about French. Now the proud owner of a new French testament (which, with Judy’s discount, cost me exactly 82 cents), I revisited the idea of taking a course that might help me actually read my New Testament and converse in French with my daughter.
The idea, like the mountain, intimidated me almost as much as it interested me. It smacked of adventure, accomplishment and conquest.
“Am I up to it?” I wondered.
Other days, observing people instead of peaks, I’ve noticed a recurring theme, particularly among women in my age range. Generally, this theme has nothing to do with French. It has everything to do with reawakened dreams.
Many, in their youth, longed to develop a certain skill, follow a certain interest, pursue a certain path. Then life intervened. Often, “life” included taking care of others and launching them toward their dreams.
Now, these women find their own dreams reawakening. But they wonder, “If I couldn’t get there when 25, how can I possibly meet the challenge at 45 or 55 or 65?”
Facing French, I have an advantage I didn’t have three years ago: vigor, arising from a growing awareness of who I am and a growing confirmation from others that I’m seeing accurately.
If you’d asked me at 25, I’d have told you quite confidently who I was and where I was going. Not knowing my view was skewed, I spent the next quarter century slamming into brick walls.
Just a few head-on collisions with rock-hard walls can shatter our confidence and our dreams. Reeling, we may take one of two paths. Either we keep attempting the same things – with the same devastating results – or, defeated, we snuff the dream and settle for staying where we cannot get beyond.
At my most shattered, I discovered another option: a gate leading out of walls I’d kept crashing into. Beyond the walls, I found a world I didn’t know existed. Beyond the walls, I’m finding me.
Once a man named Samson had a skewed view of himself. As a result, he entered walls he had no business entering. His enemies surrounded the walls, plotting to kill him at daybreak. At midnight, Samson “went out to the city gates and lifted them, with the two gateposts, right out of the ground. He put them on his shoulders and carried them to the top of the mountain across from Hebron!” (Judg. 16:3 TLB).
While I sat gazing on a different mountain, music played over a loudspeaker. Suddenly, a female singer began singing in French.
Laughing aloud, I decided: C’est possible!
As we step into our God-given identity, intimidation no longer hems us in. Barreling past it – carrying the gates, if necessary – we go places we’ve longed to go but never before could.
© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Woman reading
It felt decadent. It felt grand.
I sat crossways in my rattan chair, legs hanging over the chair’s left arm, feet propped on the windowsill. With the window raised, the breeze tickled my toes. The afternoon sun warmed them.
Most of the day, I’d sat reading. Turning each page, starting each chapter, I faced a mini-skirmish within. “Get up and do something!” the antagonist demanded.
“I am doing something,” came the insistent reply.
“If only an artist would happen by,” I thought. “Then I could pose in reading mode, and the antagonist within me would relax.” When you’re suitably employed as a model, you’re not wasting time.
The pose-for-a-painter idea – brilliant, if improbable, since the rattan chair sits in an upstairs home office – came from my 2008 engagement calendar, The Reading Woman, published by Pomegranate Communications. This lovely calendar dedicates entire pages to reproductions of paintings and quotations from books – all portraying women reading.
Authors as varied as Shakespeare, Ezra Pound, Eleanor Roosevelt and the French mystic Madame Guyon weigh in. Other quotes spring from such familiar works as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Eudora Welty writes: “She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.” Kylie Tennant announces: “She would read anything from a dictionary to a treatise on turnips. Print fascinated her, dazed her, made her good for nothing.”
Ah, but the paintings intrigue me most. A sampling of titles doesn’t begin to convey the variety of women, poses and artistic styles rendered: Reading, Woman Reading, Young Girl Reading, Woman Reading a Letter, Woman Reading in a Sunlit Room, Woman Reading by Candlelight, By Lamplight, At the Window, Reading on the Terrace, Two Women Reading in an Interior, The Reader, The Reader Crowned with Flowers – and my personal favorite: A Woman Reading near a Goldfish Tank.
The distinguished artists who painted these works were English, Scottish, Danish, French, German, Dutch, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, Austrian, Australian, Russian and Ukrainian. How interesting that so many artists hailing from such different places and periods found so much delight in capturing on canvas a woman reading. How telling that none of the artists lives today.
With the bulk of the works more than a century old, the latest was painted in 1939 by Australian Gwendolyn Grant. Titled Winter Sunshine, it pictures a young blonde woman in sunsuit reading outdoors.
Every stroke, every picture illustrates a quote attributed to Henry Miller: “We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.”
Luxuriate. Sounds decadent, doesn’t it?
Maybe that’s why contemporary US artists have trouble catching contemporary US women reading.
The day I did so, my antagonist within repeatedly reminded me of the rules: Reading, if done at all, should be relegated to waiting times in doctor’s offices, school parking lots and beauty shops – or to the moments just before you nod off, exhausted, to sleep.
I had other things to do that day – yet could not do them. I needed to break some rules.
Romans 12:2, The Message, urges, “Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it.”
Pressed in spirit, I knew God wanted me to spend the day doing what my cultural bias labeled “Good for Nothing.” I needed what Edmund Leighton identified in the title of his painting of a woman reading in an English garden: Sweet Solitude.
And thus did I luxuriate. #
© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
I sat crossways in my rattan chair, legs hanging over the chair’s left arm, feet propped on the windowsill. With the window raised, the breeze tickled my toes. The afternoon sun warmed them.
Most of the day, I’d sat reading. Turning each page, starting each chapter, I faced a mini-skirmish within. “Get up and do something!” the antagonist demanded.
“I am doing something,” came the insistent reply.
“If only an artist would happen by,” I thought. “Then I could pose in reading mode, and the antagonist within me would relax.” When you’re suitably employed as a model, you’re not wasting time.
The pose-for-a-painter idea – brilliant, if improbable, since the rattan chair sits in an upstairs home office – came from my 2008 engagement calendar, The Reading Woman, published by Pomegranate Communications. This lovely calendar dedicates entire pages to reproductions of paintings and quotations from books – all portraying women reading.
Authors as varied as Shakespeare, Ezra Pound, Eleanor Roosevelt and the French mystic Madame Guyon weigh in. Other quotes spring from such familiar works as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Eudora Welty writes: “She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.” Kylie Tennant announces: “She would read anything from a dictionary to a treatise on turnips. Print fascinated her, dazed her, made her good for nothing.”
Ah, but the paintings intrigue me most. A sampling of titles doesn’t begin to convey the variety of women, poses and artistic styles rendered: Reading, Woman Reading, Young Girl Reading, Woman Reading a Letter, Woman Reading in a Sunlit Room, Woman Reading by Candlelight, By Lamplight, At the Window, Reading on the Terrace, Two Women Reading in an Interior, The Reader, The Reader Crowned with Flowers – and my personal favorite: A Woman Reading near a Goldfish Tank.
The distinguished artists who painted these works were English, Scottish, Danish, French, German, Dutch, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, Austrian, Australian, Russian and Ukrainian. How interesting that so many artists hailing from such different places and periods found so much delight in capturing on canvas a woman reading. How telling that none of the artists lives today.
With the bulk of the works more than a century old, the latest was painted in 1939 by Australian Gwendolyn Grant. Titled Winter Sunshine, it pictures a young blonde woman in sunsuit reading outdoors.
Every stroke, every picture illustrates a quote attributed to Henry Miller: “We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.”
Luxuriate. Sounds decadent, doesn’t it?
Maybe that’s why contemporary US artists have trouble catching contemporary US women reading.
The day I did so, my antagonist within repeatedly reminded me of the rules: Reading, if done at all, should be relegated to waiting times in doctor’s offices, school parking lots and beauty shops – or to the moments just before you nod off, exhausted, to sleep.
I had other things to do that day – yet could not do them. I needed to break some rules.
Romans 12:2, The Message, urges, “Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it.”
Pressed in spirit, I knew God wanted me to spend the day doing what my cultural bias labeled “Good for Nothing.” I needed what Edmund Leighton identified in the title of his painting of a woman reading in an English garden: Sweet Solitude.
And thus did I luxuriate. #
© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Flatter 'n a flitter
Granddaddy coined the phrase. His voice solemn, his eyes twinkling, he’d say, “Anyone I catch sitting in my chair, I’ll mash flatter ‘n a flitter.”
We grandchildren didn’t know how flat a flitter was, nor indeed what a flitter was. If guessing, I’d have said a flitter resembles a cartoon character smashed paper thin by a suddenly opened door or large dropped object.
According to Dictionary.com, I had the right idea. In the Southern vernacular, the noun flitter can mean “a fritter or pancake.” Ages ago, the prophet Hosea described a flitter when he wrote, “Ephraim is a flat cake not turned over” (Hos. 7:8 NIV).
Regardless, we grandchildren sat in granddaddy’s chair, alternately giggling and screaming, as he hurried across the room and pretended to flatten us.
I hadn’t thought about the phrase in years. Then, two recent incidents brought Granddaddy’s words to mind. Traveling Highway 78 across Mississippi with our daughter Amanda one night, I hit a short, thin piece of wood. Not seeing the board until just before my front drivers’ side tire ran over it, I had no opportunity to swerve.
Immediately, I began checking the tire pressure indicator on my car’s dash. Thankfully, all tires showed equal pressure for the remaining hour of my trip.
The next morning, Amanda and I got into my car, intending to head out shopping. Immediately, a warning light and insistent ding alerted us that the front drivers’ side tire was low. Getting out to look, we confirmed the report. Ultimately, we went shopping in my husband’s car while he took the deflated tire to be fixed.
Three weeks later, my sister Karen was driving across Mississippi, taking primarily four-lane highways. On the one 50-mile stretch of two-lane road, she had a flat tire.
Thankfully, the tire didn’t blow. Instead, deflating, it made a noise like a helicopter. Hearing the noise, Karen saw flashing lights in her rearview mirror. A young man in a white truck behind her was signaling a warning. Then, she felt the rear drivers’ side tire go flat.
As she pulled off the road, the young man passed her, turned into a driveway and walked back. Before she could say, “Flatter ‘n a flitter,” he changed her tire. She tried to pay him. He refused. She asked his name. He wouldn’t say. “Just count this as my good deed for the day,” he said.
“Oh, I think this counts for the next week or two,” Karen quipped.
Flat tires, flat cakes and flattened people have this in common: The air has gone out of them. Rescuing angels – including young men in white trucks and husbands – revive what has deflated or, that failing, replace it.
Alas, my sister’s tire could not be revived. We’re planning an appropriate funeral.
Interestingly, in the Old and New Testaments, the words translated spirit also mean air or breath. Thus, a person “crushed in spirit” has, in the Southern vernacular, been “mashed flatter ‘n a flitter.”
Even the most helpful of people cannot always revive those who’ve been crushed and deflated, yet scripture insists there is someone who can.
If you’ve had the wind knocked out of you, if you’re feeling about as worthless as a half-cooked pancake, I have a message for you “from the high and towering God, who lives in Eternity, whose name is Holy.” He wants you to know: “I live in the high and holy places, but also with the low-spirited, the spirit-crushed, And what I do is put new spirit in them, get them up and on their feet again” (Isa. 57:15 MSG).
© 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
We grandchildren didn’t know how flat a flitter was, nor indeed what a flitter was. If guessing, I’d have said a flitter resembles a cartoon character smashed paper thin by a suddenly opened door or large dropped object.
According to Dictionary.com, I had the right idea. In the Southern vernacular, the noun flitter can mean “a fritter or pancake.” Ages ago, the prophet Hosea described a flitter when he wrote, “Ephraim is a flat cake not turned over” (Hos. 7:8 NIV).
Regardless, we grandchildren sat in granddaddy’s chair, alternately giggling and screaming, as he hurried across the room and pretended to flatten us.
I hadn’t thought about the phrase in years. Then, two recent incidents brought Granddaddy’s words to mind. Traveling Highway 78 across Mississippi with our daughter Amanda one night, I hit a short, thin piece of wood. Not seeing the board until just before my front drivers’ side tire ran over it, I had no opportunity to swerve.
Immediately, I began checking the tire pressure indicator on my car’s dash. Thankfully, all tires showed equal pressure for the remaining hour of my trip.
The next morning, Amanda and I got into my car, intending to head out shopping. Immediately, a warning light and insistent ding alerted us that the front drivers’ side tire was low. Getting out to look, we confirmed the report. Ultimately, we went shopping in my husband’s car while he took the deflated tire to be fixed.
Three weeks later, my sister Karen was driving across Mississippi, taking primarily four-lane highways. On the one 50-mile stretch of two-lane road, she had a flat tire.
Thankfully, the tire didn’t blow. Instead, deflating, it made a noise like a helicopter. Hearing the noise, Karen saw flashing lights in her rearview mirror. A young man in a white truck behind her was signaling a warning. Then, she felt the rear drivers’ side tire go flat.
As she pulled off the road, the young man passed her, turned into a driveway and walked back. Before she could say, “Flatter ‘n a flitter,” he changed her tire. She tried to pay him. He refused. She asked his name. He wouldn’t say. “Just count this as my good deed for the day,” he said.
“Oh, I think this counts for the next week or two,” Karen quipped.
Flat tires, flat cakes and flattened people have this in common: The air has gone out of them. Rescuing angels – including young men in white trucks and husbands – revive what has deflated or, that failing, replace it.
Alas, my sister’s tire could not be revived. We’re planning an appropriate funeral.
Interestingly, in the Old and New Testaments, the words translated spirit also mean air or breath. Thus, a person “crushed in spirit” has, in the Southern vernacular, been “mashed flatter ‘n a flitter.”
Even the most helpful of people cannot always revive those who’ve been crushed and deflated, yet scripture insists there is someone who can.
If you’ve had the wind knocked out of you, if you’re feeling about as worthless as a half-cooked pancake, I have a message for you “from the high and towering God, who lives in Eternity, whose name is Holy.” He wants you to know: “I live in the high and holy places, but also with the low-spirited, the spirit-crushed, And what I do is put new spirit in them, get them up and on their feet again” (Isa. 57:15 MSG).
© 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Tunnel ahead
You're driving along a mountain highway on a cloudless day. You round a curve and see this sign: Turn on Headlights, Tunnel Ahead. Two minutes later, you enter the tunnel.
The sun was shining before you entered the darkness. It will still be shining when you exit. Inside the tunnel, your eyes tell you the sun has stopped shining. Don’t believe them. The sun continues shining the whole time you're passing through darkness: you just can't see it.
You may not like driving in the dark, but you must keep pressing forward to get to your destination. You realize the folly of trying to turn around or back up in a tunnel.
If the tunnel is long, you may begin to wonder whether it ever ends. It does. But if you get discouraged, stop, turn off the engine and wait, you’ll never reach the daylight – and an unsuspecting driver will probably rear-end you.
To see the sun again, you must keep your seat behind the wheel while your car continues to move forward. Your headlights must continue to function. If your headlights go out or if you begin feeling claustrophobic and try to jump from the car, you're in serious trouble.
All road trips aside, you may be driving along in the sunshine. Your skies have few clouds. You can easily see the light and feel the warmth of God's love.
Then, abruptly, you enter a tunnel. Suddenly in the dark, you have no idea how far to the other end. If the light doesn’t reappear quickly, you may wonder if the tunnel has another end. Much as you might wish to do so, you cannot turn around or back up.
You don't like driving in darkness. The deeper it gets, the longer it lasts, the less you can feel God’s love.
In the days before people drove anywhere, a prophet named Jeremiah went through a long, dark tunnel time. In the midst of it, he wrote: “There's one other thing I remember, and remembering, I keep a grip on hope: GOD's loyal love couldn't have run out, his merciful love couldn't have dried up. They're created new every morning. How great your faithfulness! I'm sticking with GOD (I say it over and over). He's all I've got left” (Lam 3:21-24 MSG).
In the tunnel, Jeremiah kept reminding himself, “The sun of God's love still shines!” – though for the life of him, the prophet could not see it or feel its effects.
Jeremiah believed he would one day move out of the tunnel into the full glow of sunlight again, and he recognized the secret to getting there. Jeremiah declared, “GOD proves to be good to the man who passionately waits, to the woman who diligently seeks” (Lam 3:25 MSG).
In your tunnel times, remember this: Be still . . . and keep moving. Instead of trying to bolt and run, “passionately wait” on the Lord, sitting tight like a driver behind the wheel. Even when you cannot see it or feel it, know that once you’re in Christ, nothing can separate you from his love.
While resting in the Lord, resist the urge to park. Your destination lies on the far side of the tunnel. Keep your foot on the accelerator, your hands on the wheel and “diligently seek” to go through to the other side.
Be still; keep moving. Passionately wait; diligently seek. From the moment you see a sign, “Tunnel Ahead,” those twin headlights will keep you on track till you break out into the sunlight again.
© 1994, 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
The sun was shining before you entered the darkness. It will still be shining when you exit. Inside the tunnel, your eyes tell you the sun has stopped shining. Don’t believe them. The sun continues shining the whole time you're passing through darkness: you just can't see it.
You may not like driving in the dark, but you must keep pressing forward to get to your destination. You realize the folly of trying to turn around or back up in a tunnel.
If the tunnel is long, you may begin to wonder whether it ever ends. It does. But if you get discouraged, stop, turn off the engine and wait, you’ll never reach the daylight – and an unsuspecting driver will probably rear-end you.
To see the sun again, you must keep your seat behind the wheel while your car continues to move forward. Your headlights must continue to function. If your headlights go out or if you begin feeling claustrophobic and try to jump from the car, you're in serious trouble.
All road trips aside, you may be driving along in the sunshine. Your skies have few clouds. You can easily see the light and feel the warmth of God's love.
Then, abruptly, you enter a tunnel. Suddenly in the dark, you have no idea how far to the other end. If the light doesn’t reappear quickly, you may wonder if the tunnel has another end. Much as you might wish to do so, you cannot turn around or back up.
You don't like driving in darkness. The deeper it gets, the longer it lasts, the less you can feel God’s love.
In the days before people drove anywhere, a prophet named Jeremiah went through a long, dark tunnel time. In the midst of it, he wrote: “There's one other thing I remember, and remembering, I keep a grip on hope: GOD's loyal love couldn't have run out, his merciful love couldn't have dried up. They're created new every morning. How great your faithfulness! I'm sticking with GOD (I say it over and over). He's all I've got left” (Lam 3:21-24 MSG).
In the tunnel, Jeremiah kept reminding himself, “The sun of God's love still shines!” – though for the life of him, the prophet could not see it or feel its effects.
Jeremiah believed he would one day move out of the tunnel into the full glow of sunlight again, and he recognized the secret to getting there. Jeremiah declared, “GOD proves to be good to the man who passionately waits, to the woman who diligently seeks” (Lam 3:25 MSG).
In your tunnel times, remember this: Be still . . . and keep moving. Instead of trying to bolt and run, “passionately wait” on the Lord, sitting tight like a driver behind the wheel. Even when you cannot see it or feel it, know that once you’re in Christ, nothing can separate you from his love.
While resting in the Lord, resist the urge to park. Your destination lies on the far side of the tunnel. Keep your foot on the accelerator, your hands on the wheel and “diligently seek” to go through to the other side.
Be still; keep moving. Passionately wait; diligently seek. From the moment you see a sign, “Tunnel Ahead,” those twin headlights will keep you on track till you break out into the sunlight again.
© 1994, 2008 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
Friday, May 2, 2008
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.
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.
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