If you need to restore your soul and faith in God, go find some woods. Get lost until the only thing left, is faith. It’s similar to life isn’t it?
Sit down at the base of a tree and take in your surroundings. Look at the way the branches twist and turn. They adapt to their surroundings and grow in a way that will allow them to flourish. Close your eyes. Listen to the leaves rustling, and the birds calling to one another from distances unknown. Lie on the grass, smell the changing of the seasons. Feel the leaves crunch beneath your feet.
This is life. It is ever changing and resilient.
With a background in trauma, having “faith” in a positive outcome is probably one of my biggest struggles. Pessimism is so much easier when you are used to the bottom falling out.
Adrenaline is a funny thing. You lose the ability to think rationally, and you act. Taking a trail you’ve never walked, and having zero inclination as to the length or where in the hell you’re going to be spit out. No idea how to get back to your starting point.
Maybe the answer isn’t going back to the beginning.
Maybe the answer is listening to your intuition and adapting. Accepting that each step may have a rock hidden under the fallen leaves, or an unforeseen trench waiting to maim and mangle.
It is so easy to imagine what life “should” be. We’ve all done it. As children we imagined our husbands would be tall, dark and handsome. Our children would listen the first time we asked them to put on their shoes. Neighbors would be kind, and our perfectly manicured lawns would host beautiful mid-day picnics with the whole family adorned in Bermuda shorts and boat shoes.
In reality, Prince Charming doesn’t exist.
Birds don’t chirp merrily outside our windowsills while we cook and clean in stilettos. We simply are not meant to make it through life unscathed.
Every one of our thickets vary. Mine is overgrown, with hidden valleys and precipices. One misstep and I will stumble hundreds of feet to the frigid, dark stream below. Yours may be sparse, with patches of thick underbrush.
Regardless, it is nearly impossible to break free without minor scrapes and scratches.
But faith, that’s what will push you across that dilapidated wooden bridge. Faith tells us to cross that impossibly thin ledge of loose gravel and rock for the possibility of that lush green pasture on the other side.
If your faith is waning, I implore you, find the path between the trees.
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