It's a weekend for standing too close to a waterfall.
For reaching out to touch the nearest, trickling edge as it eats away at this ancient rock. For trusting to a stranger's long left rope as you scramble up and down steep trails. For letting the rain mist you and the spray soak you and for climbing up through crevices that hundreds of feet have traveled before you.
For driving away and coming home. For hikers that follow each other, sometimes from a distance and sometimes close enough to ask questions, as we pick our way over unmarked trails that are wider down here than they appeared from the cliff edge.
Because, sometimes, you have to get closer than the placard and the railing.
And, it sounds an awful lot like an analogy in hindsight, although it was never intended to be one. Never intended to be anything more than an impulsive need to get out of town and find something wildly and undeniably bigger and older than my single and simple life.
A need for twisting roads and green fields and towering pillars of stone, for finding a place where water cuts through the desert, not with the partially tamed and well utilized breadth of the Columbia, but with the rush of rapids and a thunder that floats like clouds.
It’s a weekend for 5th grade girls to run up and down this hill until the wind steals the breath from their lungs, to play this game simply because I’ve told them that it is the time of year to play. Because they know that the girls who went before them played this. Because I promised that we would go outside.
They are too wriggly for proper explanations, rolling and sliding down half dead grass, shivering, verbally clambering over the top of each other. Landing in piles of helter skelter limbs when they can’t quite sort through who is going to jump on who when the Caller yells out the word “service.”
Service means landing bridal style in each other’s arms. Leadership require forming a line. And, for this week, we don’t get any further than that. We leave the watercolors and the glue and explanations for next week, and, instead, they practice trusting that I will catch them when they come flying through the air.
They smack each other with floor pillows when we maybe should be praying. Doodle and whisper their way through the story. Need the same instruction repeated a second and third time, too excited about finishing to go outside to actually finish so that we can go outside.
But, we make it.
We smile and we make messes and we quite literally tumble our way through.
And, Sunday fades into a Monday where the kids at Bible club seem to have gotten the memo that this is a week for strange moods and holding space for each other. Space for first graders to use song time as an excuse to be held onto and story to curl as close as "pockets on the floor" rules will allow. For the 4th grade boy who grins every time that he stretches out and uses my shin as an uncomfortable pillow.
For kinders who come to run foot races as we review the story and first graders who slip into the kinder group to make a craft.
*s***h and H**d*n lay nose to nose on the floor, heads bent in concentration over the picture that they are working on. D*nn* comes up for the millionth hug. We split the final rice crispy into seven equal pieces, so that everyone can get an extra bite.
These are familiar paths. Ropes that we have laid down to guide each other over the steepest places. Unmarked and always changing. Wider when we trust to the next step than when we try to picture everything that lies ahead.
It's a rainy, cloudy, green in the middle of the desert, waterfall sort of week.
And, sometimes the line between miserable and beautiful is mainly formed by how many times we remember to stop and breathe.
Remember to trust to Grace.
