A Winding River of Contemplative Thoughts lo

-Lizzie Joy (loveland) Nunemaker

There’s so much beauty out there that I feel I can no longer return to. 

I see my skin, dimpled with pores like an orange, dry from too much sun damage. I’m proud of my laugh lines though, for they were chiseled out of a mountain of grief. My laugh lines are proof that joy does not belong to favorable circumstances.

I realize that my world has gotten smaller.  I feel the heaviness everywhere I go, like wearing a bear-skin rug, his paws scrape the ground as I drag on through still winters. Everything is dry exempting my son, and perhaps also my baby kitten– who still feel joy and adventure like ocean swells. 

After my first year of college, it seemed nearly everyone had a high opinion of me. But there was hollowness in my bones– again, dry, again, ready to blaze forth and fall in on itself like a hoarder’s house on fire.

The worst kind of pain is never being a victim. The worst kind of pain will truly always be seeing the horrors that you in your depraved humanity are capable of. Luckily, such horrors have a way of putting a person on their knees, I am reminded of my depravity every time I climb stairs, or get up too suddenly; they click and pop and remind me that I will always and probably very soon return to the dust with my prayers and petitions for salvation.

It’s incredible to think of how we were. I look at pictures, old cards, messages from over a decade ago enshrined in messenger– and as surely as I remembered it, we were young and buoyant! We were like lilac in bloom or like young tumbling puppies– we were– so in love with life and one another and every few days was another social event: a concert or a dance and there were so many hugs given freely to so many people. And I was thin and muscular like a doe and even though I often felt lacking I, we all, were so lovely back then! 

It’s funny to me, what has happened to all of us? Why are we all dying so fast? 

My friends that had asked me to support their missions trips fundraisers now wear upside down crosses and have traded their Bibles in for tarot cards or astrology membership club cards, or–I don’t even know maybe I should ask.

My friends– we have been together through real wars– the hot wars like World War 2 where we were ready to die on the beaches of Normandy together. But somehow we all survived our twenties and are now haunted by – haunted by the reality of surviving all that just to enter a cold war of real adulthood. Sputnik is orbiting around us every so often, emitting small beeps– like bills or threats of a bad economy, and so we have all thought about what we will use as a fallout shelter: we have our Edward Jones accounts, psychiatrists, marriage counselors, fitness class memberships, and in a crisis, we break the glass and take a vacation to somewhere tropical– or whatever we can afford to get us out of the area.

I’ve known these girls for over a decade, my battle buddies, but somehow when we’re together we’re not adoring, playful, and optimistic. (I wonder if the problem is me?) Maybe if I were more buoyant and loving and effervescent things would go smoother. But again, there’s that heavy bear-skin rug that, after long probing discussions about whether or not there’s hidden sin or bad theology in my life– gets so exhausting. And I’m finding that no one really has a taste for lighthearted intellectual discussions about the imminent threat of China as the next world power (and when we should start teaching our kids Mandarin), the poor outlook for US Dollar,  how to survive a nuclear blast (and where the fallout lands with the winds patterns), or discuss comparative psychopharmacology.

We are so much rougher now, alas, my skin!– But also just our personalities, I would have predicted that we would all have mellowed with age but instead I feel many of us have just grown to embrace suppressed rage. Sometimes it’s iron sharpening iron, other times it’s iron hammering iron into something blunt and flat and dull and resentful.

What I see, we are all dry dry wood. And we are all tired. We are like dead trees, we crack with a bang when snapped. We are needing the streams of living water. We are so dry. We are all dying so fast. Why are we dying so fast? We need that water, Lord have mercy, that joy.

Which brings me to this weekend. We visited my favorite part of the Appalachian trail: Roan Mountain, and really, all the surrounding areas. As I stood where the old “Cloudland Hotel” once was, I was reminded about the first time I hiked this, when I was desperate and fragile and how God had saved me. The thing I love most about the Tennessee portion of the Appalachian Trail is how unusually lush everything is. Water everywhere, its constant motion feels like a shock to the heart. I saw salamanders and stones and those pine trees that grow in mountain climates that smell so crisp in that wispy air up there. The greatness of God cannot be replicated, and on top of Roan Mountain, or even in its river sprung valleys, I see His glory and remember the only way out is through. This is not the first time that my Lord has led weary travelers through the desert in order to reach the promised land. May I learn to praise Him in the hot sand, just the same in the creek bed on top of a mountain. May the knowledge of His presence water our hearts again.