Backward or Forward?

It’s Sunday, so Dave and I are leaving our neighborhood for a walk. It’s the season for Ohio’s weather soup of hazy, hot, and humid days with a generous serving of gloomy rain and sudden thunder stirred in. Our smart phones tell us that we have a window of dry weather this afternoon, and I ask my husband to take me to Riverside Park. I’m not feeling energetic, but I will not let fatigue rob me of this weekend outing.

We step out of our parked car with the Blanchard River immediately in view and fall in step with the sunlit muddy waters, waters that rushed over their waterfall moments ago and flow toward the place where the flooding happens, where Eagle Creek tries to relieve itself of too much rain.

Sometimes when we walk, I feel strong; comfortable with my new normal of nerve damage; grateful to be able to walk beside my husband who is also strong despite last year’s stroke. Today, I’m having trouble getting my mind off the discomfort in my left hip, leg, foot, toes, but can appreciate the summer breeze as we walk alone between the freshly painted lines on the asphalt path, glimpsing the river between trees and flowering shrubs that grow on her banks, much like the ones that obscure the small creek at the back of our yard.

The walking app on my phone counts my steps, marking off about two tenths of a mile as we step into the underpass beneath a city street, temporarily losing sight of the water that moves forward well ahead of me in the race. We rarely meet another person here, though it was clearly the destination for some. We guess that schoolteachers brought groups of kids with stencils and bright spray paint to beautify this hidden spot with colorful leaf patterns that festoon the sides, and that optimistic teens or world-weary folks have added the philosophical sayings. Surprisingly, few have attempted to defile the space with profanity.

We exit the tunnel into a video game scene, met by curved bright blue pipes taller than us and wide enough for me to fit inside, expecting a cartoon plumber to pop out somewhere in the fenced water treatment plant, then walk on. Dave points toward the now unused bridge support in the river where he spotted a Canada Goose on her nest a few weeks ago. We imagined that day how the hatched goslings would meet the world atop the narrow concrete ledge with river water on all sides. They have flown now.

A Canada Goose family passes through our back yard

My feet keep moving forward. Even as I complain a little about how hard the walk is, I set another goal up ahead, around the next curve, aiming for the furthest point we’ve reached on this path before. And we reach it. We let the river rush on and turn around to face the walk of equal length back to the car. It doesn’t appear as a climb, but how else would the river flow toward us? I take note of a few day lilies, each one unique, beside the asphalt. We stop to examine the curly green seed pods and evil 4-inch thorns of a female honey locust tree, familiar to Dave who mows around two of them at home. Walking back to the beginning of our journey is tiring me, and it’s much too easy for me to complain about the difficulty. Dave is patient and ready to go ahead for the car and come back for me. I won’t have it.

“When you were watching TV last night, I heard a young athlete telling her story. She said that she can’t remember back to a day when she did not have pain.” He explains, “She had a diving accident.” “I don’t know what else she said, but I wonder if she would go back to that day (before her injury) if she could.” And then I spoke a profound truth, full of hope, that has brought me to write about an ordinary Sunday afternoon walk. “If I had a choice between going back to a better point in my life, undoing the painful challenges, I have to say that I would not. I don’t think that way. I don’t wish for that. I look forward. I know that the healing is ahead of me.”

The river does not rush ahead to a dead end. And neither do I. The waters will reach their destination and pour into the wide and deep lake. And I will live and move each day in the grace and strength of God until I am gathered with the redeemed, made whole and holy, where “the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert…and sorrow and sighing will flee away.” (Isaiah 35) I am thankful for these words spoken through the mouth of Isaiah, and I aspire to sigh less now, to complain less, to rest in Him when I am weary, to tell of the things He has done for me, to consider difficulties and trials as tools and training from His hand, for my ultimate good. His love endures forever.