Nowhere Else To Turn
Sponsored by Alvord Taylor & Raines Heating & Air Conditioning.
I’m driving up Avalanche Gulch, rocky cliffs shoot from earth to heaven on each side.
It’s a beautiful spot Kathy and I recently discovered in the Big Belt Mountain range behind our home.
Old mining troughs line the side of the road.
A heard of white mountain goats great me at the entrance,
But other than those six animals…..
I’m alone.
In front of me walking on the road is a white figure.
It’s somewhat human but translucent and kind of glows.
As I get closer this being of sorts turns to me and stops in front of my truck, making it impossible to keep going.
I roll down the window of my truck to ask what’s up and realize it isn’t moving and neither am I.
The being says nothing but somehow I know the answer.
I have nowhere else to turn.
I don’t know yet what any of that means.
It was a dream that haunted me last night.
To my human side it seems as though I’m stuck.
But my spirit almost feels like standing still is really a form of setting me free.
It’s hard to know when to be done with this or that.
Endings are the hardest things to write in a book, or a letter or just a blog.
But everything has to ending.
The period has a purpose.
Maybe there’s peace in the punctuation mark that ends each sentence?
For me it’s not so much a period as it is a question mark that hangs in the balance.
What’s next?
Inside fear and excitement battle for my attention.
One seeks to hold me still to stifle me the other asks me to be still so I can hear when my creator, my father, my God directs me.
I wrestle back and forth.
The match seems so familiar. I’ve been here before.
Not these surroundings but here.
But it’s different this time, of course it is that’s what makes life exciting.
A friend reminded me the other day that with endings come new beginnings.
It all sounds so good on a computer screen.
Living it out hurts.
As I look up the white figure in the road is gone but my choices aren’t.
In one of my favorite Dan Fogelberg songs the lyrics describe it like this:
“Once in a vision I came on some woods and stood at a fork in the road.
My choices were clear but I froze with the fear of not knowing which way to go.
One road was simple acceptance of life.
The other road offered sweet peace.
When I made my decision my vision became my release.”
I know which road to take what’s not clear is when to step onto the path and move.
So I wait.
I have nowhere else to turn…..so I stop,
As a child growing up military, life was full of goodbyes. It was so painful that I came to fear when my dad would call a family meeting to talk about anything. I just knew he was going to say we were moving. As an adult, and he was retired, I thought it was the end of that. The first time a family I had become friends with announced that they were moving out of state for new adventures, I panicked. Questioning God why. It’s take almost 50 years to learn goodbyes are part of life. Just as endings mean new beginnings.