Keep On

Do you ever slow down long enough to realize how utterly helpless you are, how utterly helpless we all are? There is a certain understanding that comes when you know you have done all you can do. Put your shoulder to that rock and give it everything you have. Then what? What do you do when it continues to stare back at you, cold, unemotional, stoic in your exhausted presence?

We hide behind our Franklin Planners, I-pods, cell phones, jobs, the noise and busyness of the ordinary, our daily routines and the facade of the familiar. We are so preoccupied with the familiar we forget it is like a neon light, artificial, fragile. Like everything else it can be turned off in an instant. The only real power in the familiar is its ability to delude us into thinking the temporary is permanent.

How many times have I asked God, what do you want me to do? You are my intimate, unfathomable God. Sometimes I feel you in my heart, and yet, more often I wonder where you've gone, what I've done or didn't do to make you leave.

Scripture is the grounded compass leg that lets its brother explore horizons while it holds down the fort, keeps the home, never changes. It reminds me you are with me always, whether I feel you are or not. It reminds me that one day that rock will not block our way.

You are the invisible footprints that send, sustain, carry. One day I will see the one who has been with me all along, ... and I will say, "My Lord, My God."

But right now Lord, today, this minute, I struggle against invisible chains that bind, bruise, beat. They back off now and then least I become numb to their pain.

What am I not doing that you would have me to do? What am I doing I should depart from? My search for understanding brings me back to the rock.

My friend called and said it took his wife thirty minutes to climb the stairs. MS rides her back and pushes her to the floor. She says she's ready to die, just to have some peace. The paper says the body of the boy of eight washed to shore. His mother's yet to be found. A woman walks quickly. A knee-high girl hurries ten feet, fifteen feet behind to catch up. Our hearts break. Lord, the rock, the rock.

I do not know disease or drug, but despair hunts my presence, haunts my heart if I get too far from scripture. Scripture convicts, reminds, encourages, nourishes hope. Hope, fragile as a butterfly, more powerful than a nova.

I cannot move that rock. My compassion cannot help my friend defeat MS. My prayers Lord? Are my prayers only a witness that, like a child I reach for you? I do not feel like I am mounting up on the wings of eagles. I only know to place one foot in front of the other and keep on keeping on.