Chapter 16
Surprise Visitor
The summer progressed. July was hotter than June. August was hotter than July. We heard no word from Zack.
“What are you gonna do, Corrie?” Pa asked me one day at breakfast. “That paper of yours is getting fuller and fuller of election news all the time, and I still haven’t seen your name in it anywhere.”
“Are you going to write for Lincoln or Douglas?” asked Tad around a mouthful of warm biscuit.
“She wouldn’t support a Democrat,” said Becky. “You’d never go against Mr. Fremont’s party, would you, Corrie?”
All summer, Katie and Edie had kept political issues stirred up to such an extent that even Becky and Tad were aware of what was happening. We’d managed to stay clear of any arguing about it again, although Edie and Almeda kept a cool distance from each other because of their strong views on the two opposite sides of the slavery question. I’d never really thought much about Almeda being a “northerner” before. But even ten years in California couldn’t take the Bostonian out of her, any more than Edie’s recent trip west could take the Virginian out of her.
“I don’t know, Becky,” I answered. “I suppose I might be able to support a Democrat someday if he was the right man. But not this year. As far as I can see, Mr. Lincoln’s the best man to be president.”
“Then why don’t you write an article saying so and send it in to Kemble?” asked Pa.
“I’m still a little confused over how Christians can feel so differently about the same thing.”
“They do, though, so why don’t you just jump into it and give ’em your two cents’ worth?”
“What if I’m not right?”
“Do you have to be right to speak your mind?”
“It seems like if I’m going to advise people what to do, and tell them how they ought to feel and how they ought to vote, then I have to be right. I couldn’t do it otherwise.”
“Do you still have doubts about how you feel, Corrie?” asked Almeda.
I thought for a while. “No, I don’t suppose I do,” I answered finally. “I guess down inside I do think I know that slavery is wrong. It’s just knowing whether I’m supposed to say that in public, and tell people they ought to vote for Mr. Lincoln—that’s the thing I’m still unsure about.”
“How are you going to know that?” asked Pa.
“I guess I’m waiting for some sign from the Lord, something that tells me he’s urging me one way or the other. You’ve always said to me, Almeda,” I said, turning toward her, “that when in doubt about what to do, it never hurts to wait.”
“God never will discipline us for going too slowly.” Almeda smiled. “I’ve had to learn that the hard way. We can get ourselves into plenty of trouble by going too fast, but not from holding back waiting for God’s guidance.”
“What kind of a sign, Corrie?” asked Tad. “Is God gonna say something to you in a dream or something?”
I laughed. “I don’t know, Tad. I doubt it. Just circumstances, probably. I feel like I know what’s right, and even what I’d like to do. But I also feel like I need to wait until he brings something to me, rather than me going out to do something myself.”
“Well, I hope he does it pretty soon,” said Pa. “If you wait much longer without making up your mind, the election’s gonna come and go and leave you behind altogether.”
“If that happens, then I’ll just figure I wasn’t supposed to do anything in the first place, and everything will be fine.”
After breakfast I decided to saddle up Raspberry and go for a long ride. Somehow the day reminded me of the one more than two years earlier when I had ridden up to the top of Fall Creek Mountain on my twenty-first birthday. It had been a while since I had a good long ride, and somehow the questions at breakfast put me in a reflective mood.
The sun was well up as I headed off east, and the earth was already warming up fast. I never got tired of the smell of sugar pines under the beating of the sun’s rays. Especially if there’d been rain anytime recently, and the earth underneath a bed of fallen pine needles was moist, the fragrance of the warming dirt, the dead leaves and needles and cones, and the live breathing trees were to me the very smell of heaven itself.
It hadn’t rained today, of course, because it was the first week of August, but the smell was almost as wonderful. The rugged, rough-textured bark of the trees, cracked and splitting, oozed the translucent sticky pitch that ran up and down the trunks. It was precious to me, as were all things of the forest, as indications of the fingerprints of God when he made the world.
I had been thinking for a year or more about the first chapter of Romans, and found myself almost daily awakening to its truth, that God’s invisible being really was clearly visible and obvious in everything around me—that is, if I had eyes to see him.
The world tells us what God is like. But most folks don’t take that truth deep enough to allow the world to really speak actively to their hearts and minds about God’s character. I found myself forgetting it sometimes, too. At such times, the world around me only spoke quietly, not with the vibrant reality that the bark was speaking to me today about his creativity.
More and more I thought that God intends for the world to really speak to us—loudly, constantly, every day. I believed that God means for our surroundings to be a very close-up way of us getting information about him. The world God made with his own hands should speak to us just as directly and actively as the words of Jesus himself.
As I rode through the woods and meadows, I found all these thoughts running through my mind as they had many times before. I found myself thinking about the barn back at home, and how much it could tell a stranger about Pa, if that stranger took it upon himself to look past the surface appearances of things—how orderly Pa kept his tools, how he lined up the spare saddles, the stables, the feeding troughs, the wagon and buggy, the loft for hay and straw. To a casual observer, none of these things would be especially noticeable. But since I had heard Pa talk about why he had done such and such and question aloud how he should build this part or where he ought to put that, I saw evidences of Pa’s personality everywhere as I looked around the barn.
I saw Almeda’s personality at home and in her office at the Mine and Freight in town, too—how she kept her desk, the pictures on the walls, the books in the bookcase, how she organized the whole business. She was there, just as Pa was in the barn—even if neither of them happened to be there in person. The barn, the office, the house—they all reflected both characters and personalities because they had put so much of themselves into them, maybe even without knowing it.
In the same way, the whole world is like God’s office, his barn, the room where he lives. His desk and walls and rooms are full of things that are shouting about the person he is. It’s up to us to try to discover what those characteristics of his personality are. Every tiniest detail of the universe is full of energetic life.
The bear and the ant both reflect the God who made them—the bear, his power and magnificence; the ant, his energy and productivity and unceasing labor.
The sun and the moon both are pictures of God—the heat and brightness and life-sustaining force of the sun, and the reflected light that God’s being is able to give, even in the darkness when the fullness of his presence is turned away for a time.
The world could no more keep quiet about the nature of God than could Pa’s barn or Almeda’s office about them. The world is shouting at us, so loudly that in most people’s ears it sounds like silence. The thunder of his voice is so huge and so deep that it rumbles past them in awesome silence. They hear nothing.
I reined Raspberry in, slowed to a stop, then dismounted. I hadn’t gone far, probably not more than an hour from home, not nearly as far up into the mountains as I had that day two years before.
Most of the ground was brown under the scorching summer’s sun. Where snow had lain six months earlier, now the dirt was hard-packed, with dried mountain grasses blowing gently in the rising breeze. Among the trees all was still and quiet. The only sounds were those of the birds overhead and the buzzing of bees and flies and other tiny flying creatures.
I left Raspberry tethered to a pine branch and walked through a thicket of trees into an open meadow. I felt full, happy, overflowing with life. Thinking about God all the way up as I had ridden had filled me with a sense of how good he had been to me.
Suddenly I found myself running . . . running across the grass as fast as I could, running toward nowhere, but urged on by a feeling inside I could not keep back. I wanted to scale the heights of the hills under my feet, I wanted to run and climb to the peaks of the world, I wanted to shout and sing and laugh and cry all at once!
On I ran, my heart pounding, my legs beginning to tire. But the weariness just made me want to run all the more! I wanted to exhaust myself, to run until I dropped!
At last I could not go another step.
I lifted my hands into the air and threw my head back, gazing upward into the empty expanse of blue. Two or three white, billowing clouds hung there in the midst of it, lazily working their way across the sky. I felt great throbbing prayers inside me, yet I had no words to say. There was only a sense that God was nearby, and even that he was looking down on me right then. A closeness came over me that I had never felt before, as if his great arms of love were wrapping themselves around me, even as I stood there all alone in the middle of that meadow, hands held upward toward the sky.
Slowly I dropped my hands back to my sides and turned around and began walking down the way I had run. I was crying, although I did not know when the tears had begun to flow.
I don’t think I’d ever been happier in my life than in that moment. I knew God my Father was with me, that he loved me, that his tender arms were about me, and that I was his.
“God,” I said softly, “I want nothing more than to be your daughter . . . to be completely yours. Oh, God—take away from me any other ambitions or motives or desires than just to let you be my Father every moment. Let me be content that you care for me, as content as I am right now.”
All at once the prayers that I hadn’t been able to pray a few moments earlier began to bubble up out of me in an endless spring. Thoughts and prayers and feelings tumbled together from out of my heart and mind. Such a desire swept through me to be nothing more, to do nothing more, than what God himself wanted for me. Any anxieties I may have had over the future or what to do vanished. I knew God would direct my pathway, as one of my favorite proverbs promised.
I felt so thankful, so appreciative to God for all he had done for me—for the love of life, for the sense of his presence with me, for the peacefulness he had given me. What poured out of me was unspoken thankfulness, and a calm knowing that he would direct my steps, that he would keep my life in his hands, and that he would show me what I was to do and when.
I rode Raspberry back toward town and arrived at the house sometime shortly after noon. My spirit was still calm, and I could not have been more unprepared for the surprise that awaited me the moment I walked in the door of the house.
There, talking to Pa, sat Cal Burton!