Chapter Five
I woke up Christmas morning still feeling numb and exhausted from doing thirty hours of driving in the past three days. What I really wanted was to go to Mineral Wells and do some hiking by myself, just to think and clear my mind and have some time with God, and that desire got me out of bed, into the shower, and dressed before it occurred to me that state parks were probably closed on Christmas.
So there I was, all dressed up with no place to go, until I thought about the place where the guys and I had watched the storm a week or so ago. I didn’t know exactly where it was, but I had the feeling that I would recognize the exit if I saw it again. Once I was off the interstate, it was just a matter of driving south until I lost sight of civilization.
The Tahoe hummed underneath me as I sailed westward under a mostly sunny sky. It was pretty, as Christmases go, bright and sunny like a holiday should be, not gloomy and raining the way most of them had been back north. Before long I had found a turnoff that looked familiar, and made my way south on a deserted county road.
I found myself on top of the same hill where we’d sat to watch the thunderstorm, and on a whim I climbed onto the roof, raising my arms and looking all around me at the rusty clay and scrub brush that extended for miles toward the horizon. I felt like the only man on earth, but not in a lonely way. Rather the opposite, I felt God more closely than I’d ever felt him before, out in this earth that his fingers had molded.
Maybe I understood a little more clearly what it meant to be a creation of God, out there looking at some of the other things his fingers had made. Everything here had been meticulously crafted, adorned with incredible beauty, special to God even if it went completely unnoticed by the handful of humans who ever drove through here. And, hard as it might be for me to accept it sometimes, the same thought and care had gone into me. I was valuable to God, no matter what anyone else said, because he had built me. Unlike the clay, I was capable of appreciating who he was, of having a friendship with him and talking to him and interacting with him. It was pretty humbling.
I sat on the roof, a bit overwhelmed both by the beauty around me and by those thoughts flooding into my head, just taking it all in and enjoying my time in nature. Maybe it was just the peace of the place, utterly silent except for the wind teasing my hair, or maybe it was from focusing on God, but I felt my stress and exhaustion starting to slip away.
It had all happened so fast. I’d spent twenty-three years building the wrong kind of life, and God had demolished it and built a new one in less than a month. Now I was writing songs and magazine articles for a God I’d barely thought twice about. And that, I realized, was the answer to all the questions I’d been asking about my identity.
Who was I? That was the question that had brought me to my knees before God the night I told him I needed him as my Savior. In the weeks since, he had answered it, using thunderstorms and strangers on the highway and friends and music and psalms. I was a child of God, one of his beloved creations, valuable to him because he made me and he cherished me. My purpose was to live in community with him and with the other people who loved him, and to take that message to people, like my parents, who didn’t know it yet. It made sense. I was seeing it for the first time.
I laid back on the roof of the truck, basking in the sunlight, almost unable to comprehend the magnitude of it all. There was really nothing left to do but thank God, praise him, let him know that I noticed what his hand was doing. He seemed closer than ever there in the desert.
After a few hours talking to God, I climbed down and went back home. That made me pause – I had called it home, for the first time. That seemed important to me, maybe the last indication that I had turned a corner and was really in a new life now.
I knocked on the door to Danny’s apartment and was met by Abbie, who looked stunning, dressed up in her Christmas best. I was suddenly self-conscious, since I hadn’t changed, and I probably smelled like sunlight and clay still, but Abbie didn’t mind as she pulled me toward her.
“I’m so sorry about your trip,” she said.
“Don’t be,” I told her, rubbing the back of her neck. “It was good. I’ll tell you all about it.”
I hadn’t meant to dominate the dinner conversation, but that’s how it happened, as I told them all what God had been showing me on my trip and out in the desert. My plate was still nearly full, the ham neglected and the mashed potatoes nearly cold, about the time the others were finishing, but they were listening, fascinated, at what I was saying. “I can’t believe you’re the same guy that Elizabeth and I took cookies to earlier this month,” Danny shook his head.
“You seem really happy,” Elizabeth added, “really content. I haven’t seen much of you since the night we watched Aladdin, but I’m with Danny. You’re a totally different person.”
I nodded slowly, finally giving my ham some attention. “It’s a miracle.”
“I hate to be that guy, but it’s really not a miracle,” Danny corrected. “A miracle is when God breaks the laws of nature. Parting the Red Sea, raising Jesus from the dead, those are miracles. This was just God being God, and the church being the church. I’ll be the last person to accept credit for the way God has used me, but I can see plain as day that he used me – used us, all of us – in bringing you to faith, and that’s an incredible feeling. All we did was what we were supposed to do.”
“Be that as it may, thanks,” I told him, meeting Elizabeth’s and Abbie’s eyes in turn. “All of you. You’ve made a difference beyond what you know.”
“Eat your ham,” Abbie laughed. “You’re getting sentimental.”
We talked and laughed for hours, and finally Abbie stood to leave. “Let me walk to your car,” I offered.
“Yeah, sure.”
On the way down the staircase, I had a crazy idea, and after debating for a minute whether to actually do it, I told Abbie to take a break at my floor. She relented, with a confused smile, and waited outside my door while I dashed in and changed as quickly as I could into a dress shirt and slacks, squirting myself with some of the cologne that I’d owned for years and never used but for some reason – maybe just for this moment – had felt like bringing with me to Texas. I stepped out into the hallway, slipping my arm around Abbie’s waist. Her eyes nearly popped out of her head as she tried to take in the sight.
“All this to walk me out to my car?” she wondered.
“I thought perhaps we might do a little more than that.”
Now thoroughly mystified, we walked arm in arm out the front door, across the street to the park, until we stood on the same patch of grass where Abbie had told me about Jesus the night I became a believer. “I was hoping we might dance,” I told her.
“You know how to dance?”
“No clue,” I said, with an embarrassed laugh. “But how hard could it be?”
I pulled her close, and we slowly swayed back in forth, while the trees applauded overhead and a gentle breeze kissed us. No words seemed appropriate, under the stars, so we just danced, feeling like it was enough to be there together. And it was.
I don’t know how long we were there, minutes or hours, but finally Abbie looked up at me with a sheepish grin. “I realize you’ve got pants on, so you might not be aware of this, but…it’s pretty chilly out here.”
“Then let me walk you to your car. For real this time.”
I offered her my elbow, gentleman-style, and she put her arm in mine as we strolled toward the parking lot. At her car we paused, and embraced again, before she slid in the door.
“Thanks,” I told her. “For being you.”
She smiled so brightly I thought it was going to push back the night. “Thank you too, Eli. You’re a wonderful man and I’m so proud of who you’re becoming.”
“You believed in me,” I reminded her.
“So I did. That was one of my better moves, I think.” She brushed her hair
back behind her ear. “See you tomorrow, Eli. I’d like to come hang with you for a while if you don’t mind.”
So she drove off into the night, or the morning, whichever it was at the time, and I went back to my room, feeling like the most blessed man on earth.
New Heart Church Page 38