I was only gone overnight, but still I missed home – my bed, Hiram, spending a day with the daughter, fussing over my flowerpots after all this wind and heat. Most of all I missed walking down our little gravel road for even one spring morning. This is it’s most beautiful time of year, every day a surprise of new wildflowers in the ditches and the songbirds serenading every step I take.
My overnight hostess pointed me in the direction of a good place to walk this AM. “It’s real pretty down through the cemetery. Just go south on the blacktop a little bit and take the gravel road straight instead of curving along the blacktop. You can’t miss it.”
But I’ll still miss being home on this beautiful May morning. God, help me be grateful where I am.
I took off, certain no walk could be as sweet as our little gravel road on a sunny May morning. My pessimism was rewarded during the brief stretch of blacktop and even on the first stretch of gravel. No cool shade trees. No birdsong. None of the stillness that puts my heart to rights when I walk hidden from the world.
But one step into the cemetery, the birds began to sing. Two steps in, and the trees blessed me with shade. A few more steps and the road noise was gone. My mind quit racing, and my spirit grew quiet as I passed the rows of headstones, many of them already decorated for Memorial Day. I walked further in and spied a road that curved along the cemetery’s western edge and down a hill. Following the path, I descended into a cool, green, shady woods, the view so similar to the one along my little gravel road, my homesickness vanished.
God’s graceful answer to my plea surrounded me. I was grateful for my night away from home, for this reminder that God hears my prayers and answers them in kind and ordinary ways. I took in the view, breathed the fresh greenness of it, and breathed out praise, feeling a bit like the farmer in one of my favorite movies, Babe.
That’ll do, God. That’ll do.
I looked up as God looked down. And I’m pretty sure He winked.
