walk with me
Kevin and I set out for our walk in the early morning, while the air is crisp and new light glows soft pink. We smile over the volume of the birds, how they chitter and squaw from fence post to power lines to the peaks of the trees, sentinels passing messages. We gesture and smile, without needing to speak to make the comment. Sometimes we can walk a mile without saying a single word, waking up pilgrim-lean and fresh-scrubbed with sleep, newly reassembled, with the shadows of healing dreams still clouding our minds.
But this walk represents a communicative silence, a carved-out space we reserve to begin again, a foundation that extends beyond the words, I am his and he is mine and we are God’s, together.
The route we take is almost always the same. Riley used to follow-up How was your walk with Which way did you go and require me to recite the street names and turns, until one day I lost patience and began to say, “The way we always go. We went the way we always go.” The truth is that the route is almost always the same, but the walk itself is always different.
We are pilgrims; sometimes we put down a heavy thing or cast off something hindering. Sometimes, when we begin to speak, one of us will say, “So, I’ve been thinking,” and all the way home we will travel through those thoughts, and it feels like slogging through the woods and tearing out a new trail. Sometimes, we lift up our broken hands and tend to each other’s wounds. Sometimes we point out beautiful things and lift our noses to smell the heady fragrance of Summer blooms and count bunnies we see out munching grass, wide-eyed and frozen at our approach. Sometimes, we pray. Today, we softly ask questions that have no answers and let them drift away on the wind that tickles our cheeks. We have discovered that there are many ways to be together.
In one of my favorite passages of scripture, Jesus offers a blessing for us in prayer:
May they all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us, so that the world may believe you sent me.
John 17:21
For a long time, the words felt twisted, tangled, impossible for me to separate. In me and in you and in us. What could it all mean? But Riley made me learn a thousand ways to braid her hair, and I finally began to understand. And on our walk, I wrap my fingers around Kevin’s bent, swinging arm and our breathing becomes a prayer–Emmanuel, you are with us. We follow a bend in the road past a crepe myrtle heavy with flowers, shedding them like confetti over the pavement, and at last I follow those words, in you and in me and in us. Silently I begin to pray, I am his and he is mine and we are yours, together.
I love that God would use marriage to teach us how to be one with Him, to weave us into a three-stranded cord, so synergistically relational as to become inseparable, and I love that He would use something as simple as our daily walk to teach us how grace lives. I love that scripture repeatedly compares our relationship with God to a walk like this one, because I need the comparison. This is something I understand, the two of us quietly putting one foot in front of the other together, and God with us making it all holy ground, a throwback to a time when the first man and woman actually heard God walking with them. Sometimes I imagine that since most days carry us along the same route our life is only ordinary; I imagine glory burns off like the crispness of morning. I need this, God calling walk with me, because sometimes I believe in our patterns and routines more than in the love we give and receive through them. It’s like focusing on the route instead of the man I’m walking beside, or observing specific forms of worship but never falling in love with God.
I look up at Kevin and I smile.
“What?” He says, his eyes gleaming because he knows me.
I confess; I tell him how sometimes I try to define my relationship with God using a carefully practiced routine; I tell him that sometimes self-discipline and self-reliance take over. I shake my head as I say this, because God has just reminded me what the word relationship means, because God has just set me free to enjoy him, again. I shake my head, because I understand that this walk would not be beautiful if I expected it to always be the same.
