The River Under the Field
The river does not stop being a river because you cannot see it. Neither do you.
Everywhere I live there seems to be a river that runs through it. Real picture above and the crests and water marks to follow are my way of tying these together. Becoming is not easy……
Sooner or later, someone asks the question.
I got it at a folding table in a fellowship hall, paper plate in one hand, a man named Dale in the other chair who had already finished his pie and started on his wife’s.
“So what do you do?”
Most of us answer with a title.
“I’m a teacher.”
“I’m a nurse.”
“I’m retired.”
If we’re feeling especially honest, we answer with our circumstances instead.
“I’m divorced.”
“I’m a cancer survivor.”
“I’m just trying to make it.”
None of those answers are wrong.
They’re simply not the whole story.
I’ve started to wonder if we’ve been answering the wrong question.
Maybe we are not the titles we’ve collected.
Maybe we are not the mistakes we’ve survived.
Maybe we are not even the feelings that came to visit us this morning.
Somewhere along the way, life has a way of making us forget who we are.
Beneath all the noise, something keeps whispering the same three words.
Keep coming home.
My life has never moved in a straight line.
Some seasons I feel close to God.
Some seasons I drift farther than I care to admit.
Some days I wander.
Some days I remember.
Grace finds me either way.
Faith is not a ladder.
It is more like the Flint River in August.
The water falls.
The shoals appear.
A man can stand in the middle of the channel in his boots and swear the river is gone.
It is not gone.
It has simply slipped beneath the limestone.
It is running beneath the field, and it will rise again in a blue spring three counties south, cold and clear as the day it disappeared.
The river does not stop being a river because you cannot see it.
Neither do you.
We drift.
We return.
We drift again.
Beneath every current is another current, carrying us toward the One who called us long before we knew His name.
Dale is still waiting on an answer.
I hope the next time I have a simpler one.
I am a soul,
learning my way home.
If God allows,
I will leave a lantern burning
where the trail bends.
Someone I never meet
may find enough light
to keep walking.
Boutwell Jones
The Gospel According to the Basin
