15
The Guide

Growing up, the woods were my home. Behind our neighbor’s magnolia tree and a row of bamboo shoots was the most exhilarating place for a little girl who was born to be an unsolved mysteries detective. The shadowy, damp, overgrown woods were home to crime scenes and quandaries that only Nancy Drew and I were quite brave enough to solve. I collected snakeskins and poked at dead birds. I inspected paw prints and determined that there were at least five wolves, a pack of wild turkeys, and probably a group of abandoned children living behind our house in Laurel, Mississippi. It was all very Boxcar Children.

I loved being in the woods because I loved dead things. I think there are some psychiatrists who would use this to assert that there is an increased likelihood I might turn out to be a serial killer, but I simply believe it points to the inquisitive, detecting spirit I was born with. While other kids wanted to be on Disney game shows where you could win your very own Schwinn bike or a trip to Disney World, I wanted to be on Unsolved Mysteries or Rescue 911 with William Shatner. Not as the missing or dead person, of course, but as the Nancy Drew detective that I was born to be.

So I devoted myself to the woods behind my house. Some days I brought a notebook and took notes. Other days I just took a bottle of water and my best poking stick. Always looking for clues, crime scenes, or critter holes, I was a fearless explorer.

Well, for the first ten feet into the woods I was fearless.

After that, I was terrified—the most afraid, un-brave child those woods had ever seen. Each twig breaking underfoot brought me close to an all-out panic attack. And the slightest movement in the limbs paralyzed me in my tracks. The sight of a real-live animal? Forget about it. I was planning the funeral out in my head as the giant wolf (neighbor’s dog) roamed around, waiting to eat me.

The fear was paralyzing. If I wasn’t afraid of getting lost, then I was afraid of being eaten by an animal or kidnapped and never being found. My fears were deeply rooted in the security of someone knowing where I was at all times. Maybe it was because my mom left me at church or the grocery store one too many times. I was that kid who ended up going to the lady at the front and saying, “I think my mom left me, but can you page her just in case?”

Or maybe it was because my dad was an Eagle Scout turned police officer turned military man who taught my sisters and me how to start a fire with sticks, how to gouge somebody’s eyeballs out as our best method of defending ourselves, and how to get un-lost from the wilderness—or at the very least, how to dig a snow-hole. Because one gets a lot of snow in Mississippi and Central Texas. Knowing how to dig a hole in the ground in order to avoid frostbite comes in real handy.

I’m not sure why I was so afraid of being lost, but it was the biggest fear of my childhood.

While my dad assured my sisters and me that when you are lost, it is safer to stay exactly where you are and let someone come to you, I always found this to be an absolutely terrible idea. Terrible. It seemed so paralyzing and hopeless. Sitting still? In the woods? Waiting for nightfall, waiting to be eaten? Trusting someone else to come and un-lost you?

No thanks.

I’d rather get more lost. And be more terrified. And keep repeating the senseless cycle. Anything but sitting in the lostness. Anything but waiting for someone else to come and find me.

The state of Iowa confounds and befuddles me. It’s a never-ending maze of cornfields. We don’t-like-to-be-lost people, well, we don’t like mazes. Or cornfields. Or mazes in cornfields. Don’t even think about asking us to do a midnight maze on Halloween. Not. Okay.

Ryan and I were driving through the cornfields of Iowa once, when suddenly the road just stopped. I mean, you could see where the road eventually would keep going, but for the time being, it literally stopped without any warning. Right there, in the middle of that two-lane country highway, 150 miles away from the city we had come from, there was a big sign that said ROAD CLOSED.

Now, I can get a cell signal at the top of most mountains, but apparently Iowa is off grid. There was no cell signal. No GPS. No human beings so we could go old-fashioned and just ask for directions. Nothing. Just a mom, a dad, a baby, and a bunch of corn.

You have three options when this type of thing happens. Immediately turn around and go back to where you came from. Or bump up against the ROAD CLOSED sign while singing magical incantations and hoping that maybe, eventually, by bumping into it enough the great and powerful Wizard of Oz will send a good witch who shows you a yellow brick road instead of cement trucks and gaping holes in the ground. (And trust me, I see how this appears to be a valid option.) Or find a different road.

The biggest problem that day was that there were no detour signs. None. What kind of sick joke is that? I think it was Iowa’s way of seeing if their own people were still inventive and self-reliant. With no map or GPS you just have to follow your hunches. It was like a statewide hunches test—making sure Iowans still had them and were still using them. But I didn’t want to be included in their experiment. I don’t like taking tests, I’m not a born-and-bred Hawkeye, and I don’t have good hunches.

All I saw were big puffy clouds that looked like elephants in the bright blue sky. And cornstalks. Miles and miles of cornstalks. All I saw was a ROAD CLOSED sign and I knew that we were traveling on borrowed time. Soon the small baby in the backseat would erupt into baby melodrama. I saw stress. Tears. And never-ending cornstalks. The whole world could eat from that corn.

But Ryan saw adventure. It was what every tornado-chasing man’s dreams are made of. He looked around, eyes wide, giddy. Christmas had come early. He picked a gravel road. And took off. Ryan took off on a gravel road meant for tractors, with cornstalks twenty feet high on either side of us, like he was in his little-boy Tonka truck. Like there was not a baby in the backseat. Like he had driven through cornstalks before. Like we weren’t in a compact rental car.

He turned corner after corner, gravel road after gravel road, following what he thought was a “trail” leading us back to our road. I think he was killing time. I think he was secretly hoping for a tornado to come rip-roaring through like it does in the movies. Or hoping his hunches would kick in.

We traveled over bumpy gravel roads in between cornstalks for well over an hour. He smiled and I cursed Iowans. I figured we would end up in Canada. But eventually he managed to find his way out of corn and onto concrete. He crept back onto the highway, almost exactly where the highway began again. The man was more brilliant than I even knew. With a crying baby and an irritated wife who did not think it was legal for roads to just stop with no warning, he wore a private smile on his face. Just for himself. He embraced the detour and he won. He conquered the corn.

Some people are desperate for a detour. It’s a pretty good litmus test for figuring out if you are in the right place or not. If you can’t stand your current situation and secretly wish the road you are on would close in front of you so you can take a much-needed detour, it’s probably time for a life change. Don’t wait for the road to crumble; it might not ever happen. Pack your bags and get going. You have permission to write your own ROAD CLOSED sign.

I wasn’t interested in any of that ROAD CLOSED business. I wanted a road. My road. The original one that we had a map for. So my answer was to stay at the ROAD CLOSED sign until people from the Iowa Department of Transportation showed up to explain themselves and clear their stuff OUT OF MY WAY so I could continue on the road I planned on taking.

I will sit here until you build me a road. Take that, highway bureau.

The thing is, I’ve never been given the option to lay out the roads. The only choice I get is what to do when the road suddenly ends. Do I sit, wishing and hoping that the road I planned on taking will magically reappear? Convinced that if I wait one more day things will change? Sure that if I get angry enough or sad enough or pathetic enough someone will come along and build that road for me just the way I wanted it? Just the way I planned it. Sometimes I live like a hardheaded, delusional maniac, hell-bent on my original plan working.

Or do I take a different road? Do I follow an unknown detour?

The frightening, frustrating, foreign detour.

Taking a different road means defeat of the original plan must come to pass. And that hurts: it’s a death in itself. The original plan took dreaming, planning, and soul. Plan A became etched into a stream of concrete in my brain, into the flow of blood in my heart.

Sometimes Plan A disappears so quickly and morphs into a ROAD CLOSED sign. How dare it do that? I want to punch the air and have words with all the high school teachers who prodded me to come up with my ten-year plan. All the colleges who convinced me that by going to their school I would come out on the other side with a guaranteed road. All the friends and family and Disney movies that said, “Go for your dreams! Follow your heart!” As if the world always complies with dreams or hearts.

Why didn’t any of these people mention potholes? Detours? Roads that bottomed out into nothing in the middle of cornfields in Iowa?

I have spent so many weary nights cursing the world for mudslides, typhoons, avalanches, hurricanes, earthquakes, leprechauns, tidal waves, and every other calamity or abnormality that causes erosion to the soil—which causes erosion to the roads, which causes detours, which causes severe emotional torment in the heart of a girl who did a fine job picking out a good-enough road in the first place. Stop with the detours already. Haven’t you taken enough from me? I’m so tired. And so lost. And so tired of feeling so lost.

But detours happen all the same. Not because God thinks it’s a good way to teach me a lesson or sees an opportunity to create glory for Himself by thrusting me into chaos. I do not believe God is the author of chaos or pain. In a broken world, detours just happen. ROAD CLOSED signs don’t surprise God, but it is my firm belief that they are not the works of His hands either. Still, in the middle of the pain, in the center of the detour, I see God.

I hear a Voice calling my name. A prodding, whisper, Guide.

“I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the LORD, the God of Israel, who call you by your name,” says the Lord to the prophet Isaiah.1

Says the Lord to me in the middle of a dark wood and a nameless road.

The road you planned on using no longer exists, Jenny. But don’t be afraid; I will give you treasures that can only come from dark places.

When my life intersects with the world’s brokenness, Emmanuel intersects with me. God with us. The one who knows the way through dark woods and nameless roads—He will lead me. Waking me at dawn, helping me lace up my hiking boots. He reminds me to grab a water bottle, a flashlight, and some bug spray. Coffee’s fixed. Before the sun wakes the birds. Before the birds rise and wake the world. He is present. Prepared. I don’t hear a word, but I don’t have to. His eyes tell me everything I need to know about where we are going, about how I can trust Him.

Following Him in the dark places is scary, but not paralyzing. He knows when we should make a trail and where to pitch the tent. Where the next stream of life-giving water is and what the village on the other side of the mountain looks like. He sees what I cannot and illuminates the path. Not running ahead of me, not forcing me, but side by side, as trusted friends, we walk in step. And I realize I am walking on holy ground. My lostness is made holy, my journey is made bearable, my unknowing state becomes fully known as God journeys deep into the dark places with me. He is the treasure. His presence, the riches found in secret places. With each step the detour feels less like a curse and more like a holy excursion. Jesus has become the guide, and the Guide is teaching me how to move forward in the dark.

Do you trust Me? I hear Him ask.

My answer is sheepish and small. I don’t yet have the courage to look Him full in the eyes.

“Yes. I mean, I don’t know how. But I’m trying. I want to trust You.”

Then take My hand. Oh, and Jenny? Fear not. Fear not. Fear not. Fear not.

The Treasure of Darkness tells me not to fear. The Riches Hidden in Secret Places invites me to follow Him deep into the unknown. I am not alone in my lostness.