in step
“There you are, Mom,” Riley says, even though I have been walking beside her the last half hour, even though she has never lost sight of me. She says this with joy and without rebuke, as though I am the prodigal, momentarily disappeared and just returned, as though she’s been watching for me. She continues incredulously, “I was wondering where you went.”
I raise my eyebrows, because it’s not as though I’ve fallen through some hole in the fabric of time; I know she has been watching me, has heard me sigh, has traced the line of my sight up into the breezy leaves of the trees to the hidden hideouts of the birds. But she’s right that I have been far away.
Before we set out on our walk, I asked her if she still wanted to go. In the late afternoon I feel the edges of my own vulnerability, the weight of a whole day pressing heavy in my bones, in the sore muscles of my neck. This is the groaning for home, for a covering for mortality, that I feel more readily now in my middle years, and the grace in my sehnsucht is that I am learning to differentiate between here and there. But it gets harder to convince myself to keep moving, especially at the end of the day, and I had some hope that Riley would feel the same way after a full day of school.
She had pretended to consider my suggestion, practicing all the right body language—furrowing her brow and leaning over her planner to inspect it carefully, but in the end, she straightened up and said simply, “I think I want to go. It’s written in my planner.” I had to smile; I’m not sure Riley and I would take these walks except for her strict adherence to advance planning, which is actually a necessity in any sort of intentional relationship. In my better moments, I’m thankful that she won’t let me slink out of these opportunities to be together.
This afternoon I find it difficult to stay engaged though, and since we have exhausted all of the usual topics of conversation, I have fallen silent. I have hidden away in a tangled thicket of thought and prayer, intermittently counting the new blooms that dot the bushes and trees, hunting hopefully for resurrection. I have been walking our route without thinking much about the walk itself. So, when she says she wondered where I went, I can’t decide if she means that she’d lost me to my mind or if she’s referring to the mismatch in our steps. I had crossed the street in a different place and so had made the turn on a slightly different trajectory. For a moment, I had veered off in an arc while she, ever the legalist, squared the corner.
“There you are,” she’d said, purely in delight over rediscovering me, just in the moment when we fell in step beside each other again, as though my veering away, however momentary it had been, had completely disrupted our union. In a way, it had. For a moment, a measurable gap existed between us.
When we illustrate God’s story, the tragedy of an impossible relational gulf between us and God looks like a blank gap between two cliffs. I never feel like I can render that space wide enough; in a drawing it looks like something we could leap ourselves if we tried hard, maybe if we took off at a run. The inaccuracy bothers me, but also the fact that the imperfection of my drawing reflects my often-imperfect view of the situation. Sometimes, I believe in small sin; sometimes, I believe the gap between God and me when I veer off isn’t really worth noting. Meanwhile in scripture God sounds as particular about it as Riley: “If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit (Galatians 5:25, emphasis mine).” In the original, Paul uses one Greek word that specifically refers to walking side-by-side.
I want to shake my head, to tell Riley her repeated comments (no, this isn’t the first time) make no sense. There’s no need to act like I’ve disappeared every.single.time I get a little ahead or fall a little behind or take the turn in a different place. What matters is that we end up in the same place, right? How could she lose me when I’m standing just a few feet away? But now she looks into my eyes, grin shining like the sun, glances down at our feet moving in unison, and begins to laugh–that laugh, a waterfall of joy.
“What?” I ask, returning the grin, thinking that while the route brought my body back to her, it was her love, her voice, that drew my mind. “Why are you laughing?”
“I’m laughing because we’re walking together,” she says.
And that’s when I realize it doesn’t matter if the distance between us happens in body or just in my mind, because for her, this walk is all and only about us traveling together. She’s not here because she needs to walk or wants to walk, but because she wants to walk with me. As far as she’s concerned, any gap of any kind gets in the way of that. Any gap means not that she’s lost track of me but that she’s not tracking with me. It’s not that she wants to micromanage me or monitor me or manipulate me; she wants to love me. And because she loves me, she wants us to take every step together.
So again, the things of earth point to the things of heaven.
