Eighteen Miles

The fog down by the river was thick enough to make the Headless Horseman nervous. Somewhere out on the water a foghorn groans its low and beautiful note, and a train answers from somewhere further still. I prepared for the Bible study in that fog. It was as good a place as any.

Having a Bible study and praying with future teachers somewhere as notoriously secular as where we were is still something I truly marvel at. A true sign we still have freedom. What I experience is not often what we see anymore. Everyone left eventually. The library emptied out, as it was late at night; slowly then it was just the two of us and whatever she had come to read me. She read me much. The day, the pain, the secrets, the past, the present, the future, I simply grabbed a corner.

There was a man who paddled a canoe eighteen miles. I never saw this man or his canoe, and he never saw me. It was a different time and a different place, and we live in a world of time and place, but one day we won’t. This man was her father. She opened a sermon, one a pastor had preached, and inside the sermon was a letter her father had written. Her father had been dragged, more or less, on a canoe trip by the pastor’s father, an older man who apparently would not take no for an answer and was right not to. Her father was from Manhattan. He made sure you knew that. In Manhattan, he explained, they had rodents. Not canoes. He had never canoed. He had no particular desire to canoe. He went anyway. Eighteen miles is a long way to go somewhere you didn’t plan on going. But rivers have a way with reluctant men. Somewhere in those eighteen miles the Manhattan fell off of him a little, or at least loosened, and the water and the quiet and the slow movement through the country worked on him the way such things do.

This man was given a glimpse of heaven on a canoe trip. Life was like those miles on the windy river, sometimes reluctant, sometimes fun, and yet the thing he hadn’t wanted. The eighteen miles of gift he’d almost refused. And it became for him a symbol of life itself, even when he didn’t have much left. And at the end of those miles, his heaven was Christ standing there and food, not even a feast, just food, a hot dog maybe, a hamburger, plain and good, no condiments needed, and a car so he wouldn’t have to paddle back. That was what waited. That was enough.

She read all of this with tears in her eyes and did not fall apart. And when she was done, she said she was ready too. Unafraid. She had looked at death and found she was not afraid of it, and she wanted me to know. I had come into that library as something like a mentor to being the coddled child, not visible to the environment but in my mind alone. What is beauty? What are we actually after? They say it is in the eye of the beholder, and they are not wrong, only incomplete. Because God is the beholder of all. What is ugly is often beautiful outside time, where we will one day be. God bless. I haven’t written much lately. Midterms came, and the Bible studies, and the ordinary weight of days. It isn’t that the material is scarce; if anything, it is the opposite. The material is so large and so alive that any shape I press it into seems too small for it, almost disrespectful. I put too much pressure on it sometimes. I forget that I am not the source of any of it. As if I do anything.

But I am thankful I was given the day.

We are young. That is something I feel the need to say plainly, because I know how these words can sound to those who read them. There is a tendency to assume age behind reflection. We are not far along, at least not in the way people measure such things. And for myself, I find that the more I grow, the less I seem to know, and yet the stronger the urge becomes to make something known, even if only a small portion. I asked her for permission to share this, and she gave it freely, which I am thankful for. The purpose of writing it is not to market her past or package it in any form; I shared it because I believe God may use something like this to reach out to His children in different ways. If anything in this has reached you, even slightly, I would ask that you let me know so that I may pass that along to her.

𝕹𝖔 𝖌𝖚𝖎𝖑𝖙 𝖎𝖓 𝖑𝖎𝖋𝖊, 𝖓𝖔 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖗 𝖔𝖋 𝖉𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍, 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖎𝖘 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖕𝖔𝖜𝖊𝖗 𝖔𝖋 𝕮𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖘𝖙 𝖎𝖓 𝖒𝖊 𝖋𝖗𝖔𝖒 𝖑𝖎𝖋𝖊’𝖘 𝖋𝖎𝖗𝖘𝖙 𝖈𝖗𝖞 𝖙𝖔 𝖋𝖎𝖓𝖆𝖑 𝖇𝖗𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍. 𝕵𝖊𝖘𝖚𝖘 𝖈𝖔𝖒𝖒𝖆𝖓𝖉𝖘 𝖒𝖞 𝖉𝖊𝖘𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖞!!!!
𝕭𝕰𝕹 𝕬𝕹𝕿𝕳𝕺𝕹𝖄 𝕾𝕴𝕸𝕺𝕹
Writing as 𝖂𝕴𝕷𝕷 𝕱𝕺𝕽𝕲𝕰
𝕻𝕴𝕷𝕲𝕽𝕴𝕄 𝕻𝕺𝕹𝕯𝕰𝕽𝕴𝕹𝕲𝕾 𝕸𝕴𝕹𝕴𝕾𝕿𝕽𝖄