Some like to run in the woods. I love the woods. But, I also have glass ankles, as they say. And so, after having turned my ankles over numerous times playing basketball, I prefer flat ground. The flat ground of concrete or asphalt, though I do suspect the beneficiary of such flat ground is the dull ache that persists just below my right knee. I catch myself sometimes playing over a slow ankle turn in my mind…slow motion pain. Imagined pain. But informed pain nonetheless. So, for the time-being at least, I stick to the streets even as I look somewhat jealously at some of my friends galloping off into nearby trails of green and brown blur.
Over the course of a year, the commitment to run on flat ground develops the hidden habit of foot-radar. Foot-radar is the sensory device your feet develop in concert with your brain to time your steps away of from undesired objects in way ahead. I first noticed my foot-radar when walking the streets of
Trouble, real or perceived, is an interesting intruder into our psyche. Even the possibility of it seems insistent on our attention. When running on snow covered roads, my whole person seems to become riveted on what is happening at my feet. What is the surface like? Is it slick? Does it give? What is underneath the perceivable surface? This, of course, detracts from a ‘good run’, but it remains compelling. During a recent Autumn, a trail I regularly run becomes covered with oak leaves. The trail is asphalt, but it becomes so leave-covered that you wouldn’t even know that was a solid surface underneath the myriad of leaves. It is a particularly beautiful sight, even if not just for the juxtaposition of ideas it represents. It really looks like a trail…a regular earth-worn trail. But underneath is the same, trusty surface I’ve come to expect from the routine of many runs along its path.
I’m also going through a period of great unknown regarding the direction of my future. I lost my job due to a down-sizing last year and the path has been anything but expected ever since. I’m in the same places and with the same people, but everything looks different because the future is unknown. It was unknown anyway, but I didn’t know that before. Now that I do, things just look different and the radar I use to find my way is lost in some unfamiliar array.
So, the thought occurred to me during one oak-leaf-covered asphalt run that this particular path was not unlike the current leg of the journey of my life. Impossible to see whether or not things are really stable after all. All the things that I have relied for such information are now no longer yielding the data I had become so comfortable with. Is this path still firm? Especially when I can’t confirm that it is in the way that I used to? I couldn’t really know the answer to this question without running the path anyway, in spite of radar-like instincts that remind me that I need to be able to see what is there before trusting my aging body to potential ankle-turning unevenness. So I run on it anyway, feeling a new sense of something that can be trusted even when I can’t see it.
God is like this, it seems to me. At certain points along the journey, we live off the tangible feedback in our relationship with Him. We become so convinced of the trustworthiness of this data transfer that we actually find ourselves believing a very basic cause-and-effect relationship between all things…including God. This is dangerous proposition…especially since He doesn’t seem to like the ways we reduce Him to our paradigms of understanding Him.
He seems to move into areas of unpredictability in our relationship with Him. This is unsettling because, after all, the way we have built our way of knowing Him and life are now unfamiliar. But upon a close review of the people of faith – those of ancient past and those walking beside us in these days – we learn that this unpredictability is not so unfamiliar to His people. In fact, many would say ‘unfamiliar’ is a tame description of this experience with Him. Honestly, I would, too. It is not just unfamiliar, it is downright frightening. It is counter-intuitive. It is the essence of darkness. This is true because the things we are trying to protect are far more vulnerable than our ankles. And before it is over, we realize that we are entirely incapable of doing any self-preservation. Everything is at risk. We need help.
Has God ever covered your path with leaves? He has mine, using the circumstance of loss of regular employment to completely re-orient my radar of Him. And yet it is a grace of Himself that He is willing to risk our understanding of Him, in order to show us more of who He really is. Just like the strange beauty of an asphalt leaf-covered road speaks of an unseen solidness that we can learn to depend on, we learn that God is re-orienting our radar towards Him in a way that is deeper, richer, enlightening, laden with trust, and compelling for us to trust Him with more and more of ourselves – areas of deep vulnerability from which we have largely remained unaware. Such leaves help us find our true identity in Him, an identity that is not based on the cause-and-effect relationship we have experienced with Him in the past. A new kind of relating emerges, the kind that happens in the dark and that builds on things we can’t see…without putting our full weight on it.
By the way, oak leaves are still slippery...even when on asphalt.