41 | CEDARVILLE REVIEW Relax The trees here are in fading glory. Few still hold green in the palms of their hands and many hold nothing. The children’s gardens that once surrounded this place are uprooting for the winter, leaving empty beds with untucked sheets behind them. Yet today is still warm. Warm enough that I can sink my feet into the earth beneath me and reconnect with something primal, some ancient binding. This place, which is becoming as much a home as anywhere else I’ve given that name, is a mountaintop. In reality, it’s just a picnic table in a park, under a tree, surrounded by children’s gardens, but humanity has always gone to the mountaintops to reconvene with something greater, so today this town is a mountain and this is park a peak. Nock Through my drive here, which is more than twenty minutes, which passes multiple parks on the way, I wondered about potential. Then I wondered about preparation. Then I prayed about both. I feel this call, this yearning, deep within my languishing bones that says there is something different. Waiting. There is something deep and meaningful just out of reach. I pass under the highway that would take me to my parents’ house. I wonder more about the idea I had this morning— the one about an aid organization that owned its own airfleet— so that no one would ever need to worry about flight costs and so more people could go. More people could be helped. Then the idea about anti-trafficking in Thailand, and the potential that God works the most in places that are most broken, like he did over breakfast. I think he likes flipping the polarity, making our pain into power. Draw A train rattles by behind me, trumpeting in mismatched intervals. I recollect on intervals and on the fact that somehow in two years God has done more in me than he did in the eighteen prior. Mismatched intervals. Something about bible college and a broken church helped me find a deeper cistern. The light through the yellowed leaves strikes me as the color of Jesus. He’s proud of one of his kids and he’s excited to see what’s next, even though he knows exactly what’s coming every time. Anchor & Aim The wind asks the leaves to cry out. No, to whisper. No, to cheer. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. They are a natural symphony to which the branches waltz and my spirit moves within me. In this escape, in this secret place, in this sanctuary, I am grounded. My bare feet unremorsefully pad into the dirt. In a moment of clarity, I realize: the ground and the object and the goal, which simultaneously tether me to some metaphorical rock to keep me safe while tempting me with some metaphorical muse to call me forward and pushing me out of some metaphorical nest to make me fly, are all the same. Release SANCTUARY GRIFFIN MESSER
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