Published on March 30, 2019 on the Ancient Paths Facebook page.
The way is lonely and long, narrow and stony too, with potholes, pitfalls, crumbling parts. It goes through lonely valleys, darkened by low-hanging clouds. It goes up steep mountainsides where hardly a goat could pass. It’s terribly strange that in this wilderness I see neither man nor beast, only God.
I know He’s there for He picks me up when I fall and start to bleed. I know He’s there when He chastens me and doesn’t put up with my nonsense. But oh, how I long, just once in a while, for a touch, a look, a smile.
They’re there I know, the others like me, toiling and striving, but there are mountains between us, and mists in the evening, and we’re each in our own dark vale. There are as many dark valleys as those who choose to walk them.
So it’s like we’re together, but not, though once in a while there’s a crossroads of sorts, and there we can sit and exchange all the joys and the sorrows of the places we’ve been, nursing our feet, binding the blisters, carving a staff for the next stretch of hell.
If we’ll only keep going, struggling and growing, then we’ll notice a light at the end of our path. It sits on the horizon and casts a gold glow over mountains and pathway and pilgrim. And that’s when we’ll know, and that’s when we’ll see, and that’s when we’ll realize it was all worth while, and we’ll turn to our God, our cheeks streaked with tears, and we’ll thank Him for the pain and the sorrow.
It may take us this lifetime, perhaps one or two more, but the bliss of creation awaits us. The promise of oneness is ours.We may even see there were moments like these earlier on, like lamps in that darkness.
How I long to step into the light, all margins dissolved, and stride into that moment which becomes my eternity.