An inside story

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. (Philippians 4:4-5)

Very little makes me happier than mud on my boots as I walk a trail far from the sounds of any road or highway. I prefer out of the way places … or days when rough forest trails are still wet from rain or melted snow.

I know I will be alone for most of the miles, and my mind will freely wander among mysteries I don’t understand and prayers I barely know how to speak. But I speak, nonetheless, stumbling over my thoughts, talking into the Great Silence, who sometimes speaks back in the secret room of my soul to which God alone has access.

Today, the sun momentarily breaks through a moody December sky as I rise out of the woods into a tall grass prairie. My boots sucking into the mud of a sodden trail, barely a foot wide, I walk through a dense tunnel of dry, dead grasses, taller than my head, rustling in a breeze too warm for this time of year.

And I stop … and look at the sky, realizing … I’m happy, no, something more, a quiet joy, feeling held … inside an immense embrace … by a Love who loves for me to know I’m loved, whose arms are the grasses enveloping me on every side.

This is why I come out here, to feel myself inside this Love who unleashes a fountain of joy from that secret, inner room that is God’s own.

It doesn’t happen every time. But today a great ‘yes’ erupts from the depth of my being, ‘yes’ to life, ‘yes’ to the world, ‘yes’ to the Loving Mystery who bids me to don my boots and come out here to rediscover who I am and where I live.

For I live in the embrace of a great and unimaginable Love who enfolds all time and existence … and most certainly the sodden trails of Spiers Woods on a gloomy December day.

‘Rejoice in the Lord,’ Paul writes. He doesn’t need to tell me twice. Not here. Not now. But I repeat his words, wondering if the most important word in his exhortation is the smallest … ‘in.’

Out here, I know where I am. I’m not just in the woods but in the Lord, which is to say inside the Love the Lord is, inside the creation that flows from the infinitely abundant store of God’s heart, inside the story of God’s endless machinations to awaken the souls of human beings to the Love who loves them, inside the divine drama that enfolds from the unlikely birth of a peasant child in a Bethlehem stable.

I can’t think of any place I’d rather be, but then … we are all in this place, like it or not, whether we believe it or not. The story goes on, and every human soul (and everything else) is either a willing or unwilling participant in the story of God’s infinite love for this troubled world.

The willing know how privileged they are to be included, and joy spills from their souls with shouts and songs and prayers, like the shepherds who were the first privileged to kneel in the dust at the feet of the Christ child.

Looking back on my hike, I wish I’d kneeled out there … all alone … in the mud. It was a good place to say, ‘thank you … for including me.’

I think I’ll go back soon.

David L. Miller