ALONG THE WAY · POETIC REFLECTION
Under the Current
On the river, the Gardener, and the scarred hands that hold us.
I thought suffering would feel like being struck by lightning.
Instead, it feels like a river.
You begin in calm water.
The sun is warm.
The banks are familiar.
You paddle almost without thinking.
You assume this is how the journey goes.
Then the river disappears beneath you.
The current changes without asking permission.
Suddenly you are no longer moving through the water.
The water is moving through you.
My first instinct was to fight.
To paddle harder.
To correct the course.
Surely enough effort could return me to the peaceful stretch upstream.
But rivers are unimpressed by panic.
The harder I fought, the more exhausted I became.
It was not until I loosened my grip that I discovered surrender is not the same as defeat.
There is a strange difference between giving up and giving over.
One is despair.
The other is trust.
I keep wondering whether this is what Paul meant when he wrote that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces proven character, and character produces hope.
Hope comes last.
That surprises me.
I would have placed it first.
Instead, God seems content to lead us through endurance before He gives us the gift of seeing.
Perhaps hope is not optimism after all.
Perhaps hope is what remains after every illusion has drowned.
The spiritual world feels nearer than it ever has.
Not because I have become fascinated with darkness.
Quite the opposite.
Light has made the darkness easier to recognize.
There are currents beneath currents.
Choices beneath choices.
Wounds beneath behavior.
I cannot seem to look at people the same way anymore.
The anger remains real.
Justice remains necessary.
But I keep finding fractures beneath the failures.
Captives beneath the cruelty.
Broken children inside grown bodies.
It does not excuse sin.
It explains why the Healer came.
“Come out of Babylon.”
That sentence follows me everywhere.
Not merely as a warning about the world.
As an invitation.
Leave behind the systems that taught you strength meant self-sufficiency.
Leave behind the kingdom that rewards appearances over truth.
Leave behind the endless performance.
Come out.
Come home.
I have read about suffering most of my adult life.
I underlined it.
Highlighted it.
Quoted it.
I admired those who wrote from the furnace.
I simply never imagined I would one day recognize the smell of smoke for myself.
Books are faithful companions.
Experience is a relentless teacher.
The same sentences that once instructed me now seem to breathe.
I finally understand why.
Truth sounds different after it has passed through flesh and blood.
The strangest thing has happened.
I garden now.
I never expected to meet God among lantanas.
Yet there He is.
Every morning.
Pruning shears in my hand.
Dead blossoms falling into the soil.
At first I removed them reluctantly.
It felt almost cruel.
The flowers were beautiful once.
But beauty that has completed its season quietly steals strength from what is still growing.
The dead must be removed if life is to flourish again.
I wonder how many things I have mistaken for life simply because they were familiar.
Pruning always reaches farther than expected.
You think the Gardener will trim the branch.
Instead He cuts almost to the stalk.
I find myself wanting to cry out,
“Surely that was still alive.”
Perhaps it was.
But perhaps He sees the disease spreading where I see only green leaves.
The knife in His hand has never belonged to an executioner.
It belongs to a Gardener.
Still…
Gardens bleed before they bloom.
Someone once told me the trials of faith are described not merely as fiery but as refining, cauterizing.
The image has stayed with me.
A cauterized wound burns.
It feels, for a terrible moment, worse than the original injury.
Yet the burning is not destruction.
It is the beginning of healing.
I wonder how often I have mistaken God’s healing work for His absence simply because both were painful.
I do not believe God delights in my suffering.
I believe He refuses to waste it.
Those are entirely different things.
I still grieve.
Some mornings the sorrow arrives before consciousness.
Other mornings hope wakes first.
Most days they arrive together.
I no longer ask which one belongs.
Both kneel before Christ.
One brings tears.
The other brings expectation.
He receives them without asking either to leave.
The current has not yet carried me where I hoped to go.
I do not know what waits around the bend.
Restoration?
Further loss?
Resurrection in a form I have not yet imagined?
I cannot say.
But somewhere along the rapids, I stopped asking only, “Lord, when will this end?”
A quieter question took its place.
“What are You making of me while the river carries me?”
I think that question may be the beginning of wisdom.
Not because it makes the water calmer.
Because it keeps my eyes on the One who walks upon it.
And if the Gardener must prune me until little remains…
If the current must strip away everything that cannot endure…
If Babylon must fall within my own heart before I can truly leave it…
Then let it be so.
For I have begun to suspect that the worst thing God could do would be to leave untouched the branches that keep me from bearing fruit.
The knife is sharp.
The river is deep.
The cautery burns.
But the hands that hold them still bear scars.
And I have come to trust scarred hands.
