In King’s Cross, Timothy Keller writes that suffering occurs when there’s a gap between the desires of our heart and the circumstances of our life and that suffering only increases when we try and wrestle those circumstances into matching our desires instead of simply submitting to the will of God.
It finally all made sense to me this week. I was already having a horrible week, one of my worst in recent memory and then Wednesday morning I found myself stopped at a red light in the right turn lane, getting ready to make the last mile or so to work.
Turn right. Really that was the only thing on my mind, so you can imagine my shock when the woman next to me in the left turn lane, also decided to turn right … right into my car, running the length of her car across my front bumper.
The sound one car makes as it hits another car is excruciating, like ten million nails on chalkboard made all the worse by the seeming slow-mo quality of the crash. It just kept going and going as I frantically tried blasting my horn and putting the car in reverse.
Fortunately, both the other driver and I were okay, not so much our cars, but we were okay and I was left with this eureka moment of understanding that if I or any of us really had control over the circumstances of our lives, all the bad things that happen to us wouldn’t crowd together like some kind of flash mob gone bad.
We would spread out the trials so we could handle them better and address them one on one.
And it was in that moment, that I finally gave in (not gave up, never giving up), but gave in that sometimes life is simply beyond our control and sometimes instead of wrestling with it, we should just let life happen and see where God will take us.
Thy will be done.
Later that day I stopped by the church to see how the labyrinth was coming along. Pastor Debbie and Marty were there just beginning to lay out the stone path and I made a feeble attempt to walk it then.
I had much better luck with it a few days later on Friday.
I found myself back at the labyrinth early this morning. As I walked out behind the church there were two sprinklers on randomly spraying the trees in the early morning sun. I wondered if all the sprinklers were on and if I would have to walk the labyrinth in a hazy mist.
But the sprinklers turned off almost as soon as I noticed them, like I had caught them doing something they weren’t supposed to.
Next to the sprinklers, a large rabbit darted out into the grass from the trees. It stayed there for a minute, framed in sun and shadow and then hopped out a few more feet. A second later, a smaller rabbit joined it.
For a few minutes, I just stood there watching them, reminded that one of the first things that drew me to Hope was the quiet and the stillness in which I could feel the presence of God.
I drank in that stillness and then walked the labyrinth.
In the future when I look back on this week and how it was that I was finally able to feel some healing, I will look back on first the prayers and comfort offered to me by friends and then I will look at the little things, how a car accident taught me that no matter how hard we try to rein life in, life will happen to us regardless.
And I will think about how a labyrinth, a maze in which you cannot get lost, grounded me in the stillness of God.
No accidents here.
