Hammocked

I’m emerging from a busy season at work.  Probably the busiest season I’ve ever experienced there.  And there was a moment when I realized that it was all too much.  I kept saying “I’m working myself to death,” which is absolutely an overstatement.  Yet, I also knew that I had hit the bottom of my well. 

As I finished this busy season I was able to step immediately into vacation.  I had a couple of days at home before leaving for Austin, Texas.  I enjoyed exploring a new city and discovering what made it tick.  My time and my main purpose in Texas though was to visit a retreat center out in a little town called Leakey.  It took me about 3 hours to drive there from Austin.  However, my rental car had satellite radio and I quickly found the Broadway station.  So yeah, I was singing my little heart out the entire way. 

As I entered the property I left paved roads for dusty, rocky paths.  I kept driving down further and further, eventually hitting the shallowest river I’ve ever seen.  “Yes, you drive across the river” the sign exclaimed to my right.  So, for a mile I slowly drove in the middle of a river.  This drive felt like part of the transition into retreat.  It was an official leaving the normal world for a new place.  No cell reception, radio turned off.  Just me, the car, and God. 

I arrived to the retreat center, to a place that I still struggle to give words to.  Words that adequately describe this piece of beauty.  For me, being at Laity Lodge was catching the tiniest glimpse of heaven.  In my journal I wrote that it was “Rivendell in reality.” 

I had arrived early, so I just walked around the property.  Fairly early on, I discovered a hammock.  When I was 10 my dad bought a hammock and I remember lying out in the back yard many an evening.  I specifically remember learning my lines for a play I was in.  I can’t completely explain why, but the hammock feels so safe for me and brings up such comforting memories.  Lying in one was like being a child again.  I floated on the air, gently rocking back and forth, cupped by the ropey cradle that held me. 

I suppose the image of being cradled in a hammock perfectly captures this vacation for me.  God held me as I rested, pondered, and discerned.  I do come back feeling refreshed, but also reminded that I cannot say yes to everything.  I cannot do all that is in my heart all at once.  Saying no is hard, but I know that I am not called to work myself to death.  Yet, I am called to work.  As I sit in this tension, I feel a little more secure that God cradles me in the tension.  That this puzzle is not puzzling to him. 

I couldn’t find words to describe Laity Lodge, so instead wrote on my experience of seeing this place:

Amen.

Amen to this place.

Amen to this place of Idyllic beauty.

I disrupt it with my clumsy stomps.

More fitting would be the composed sailing of an elf.

They would walk as if gently floating on water.

Me?  I stomp liltingly. 

Most inelegantly.

But perhaps such gloriousness is not meant to be left untouched.   

What is beauty, but to be beheld.

Enjoyed.

Directed

Towards he who made…

Ripples of heaven.

Amen.