space is equally important

I love wide, open spaces, those places that could never be arm-measured, that overflow conceivable depth and stretch further than sight; spilling over, covering completely, unbound, unheld, uncaptured.

So today, because I need reminders, God sends us in a different direction, turning left on a road instead of the usual right, and this just as I muse over a thoughtful message from a friend, a wise and gentle encouragement:  Don’t let it fill up all your spaces; spaces equally important, if not so urgent.  It makes me smile, because she hardly could have known I’d hear that two ways, that the phrase would wrap like brackets around something God has been pressing into me.  Space is equally important.  I’d earlier written it in my journal in a gawky, wide-penned box trimmed with a few free-flitting, loosely scrawled butterflies.

This is not our usual way.

This road winds and rises and breathes where the other darts in tight morning-clogged lines, but today it seems to be the only option left open to us. And well, the truth is that sometimes we need a change of scenery to help us remember how to see.  So we twist left as I’m smiling over turns of words–spaces and space is, and for a while, instead of brake lights and lines of vehicles, we see fields of grasses bendy in the breeze, slopes brightly speckled with wildflowers, a closet-sized weathered shack crumbling into a moss-colored pond.  A solitary soul walks beneath the vast blue sky down a rough-cut path along the edge of a field, holding a dusty hat against his head with one hand.  I can see the way tractor tires have marked the way ahead of him, the way they’ve scarred the dirt.  Suddenly, it feels not so difficult to breathe, and I gather grace gifts the way a little girl somewhere in one of these unhindered spaces plucks dandelions from the yard, bundling them together in her hand to give away: lemon-yellow blooms; the artful turning of the wind; a swing—just an old board rope-suspended in a sculpted oak; the way he walks—just slow; that there are still some uncluttered places.

The profoundly powerful gentleness of these wide, open spaces reminds me of God.  And for that reason alone, space is equally important–heart space and thought space and rest space and reach space—crucial, though without pressured demand.

Just as I am upon the thought, Riley speaks into our mutually appreciative silence and says simply, “I’m so thankful that God always watches over us.”  And with the space to see, that’s enough for both of us. In wider moments, her words become exquisitely effectual, as though the wild freedom from distraction has uncloaked a bit of her soul.  I’ve seen the same thing happen for Adam at the beach, when the sound of the waves and the salty wind scrub life clean.

“Yes,” I say, but it isn’t only an acknowledgement of her comment.  Yes, that she can say that out loud—and in words, that too.  Another gift uniquely beautiful to me, carefully held, and with it the understanding that the turn that brought us here was itself provision.  He grasps our limp hands; He beckons us to see; He knows that in solitary spaces we remember to give thanks.

Sometimes it’s not such a bad thing to go a different way.

*~*~*

“We have, indeed, to fashion our own desert where we can withdraw every day, shake off our compulsions, and dwell in the gentle healing presence of our Lord.” ~Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart