Walking Through the Mud

So, for the past few weeks Henry and I have been taking a couple walks a week in the state park not too far from our house. It is a pretty nice park, not too big and not too small, our walks are somewhere between 2 and 2 and a half miles depending on the day. Usually we take the big trail all the way around the park until we take a spur and climb about 80 steps back to the parking lot. We use it in three ways, first as a nice little walk in the woods, second as a time killer on days we don't have anything else to do, and third as a way for this dad to lose a little bit of the weight that he has gained in the past few months.

We have yet to take a walk during any rain, but there are days when we take a walk the day after it has rained, and though our path has quite a bit of tree cover occasionally we do come across a section of mud and even less occasionally we come across a puddle that can be tiny or stretch completely across the path. When we are walking I talk to Henry from time to time, explaining things about nature, showing him how the water is flowing through the river, streams, or little trickles that appear randomly, and also just about random things that pop into my head.

But on those times when we encounter the mud and water I always discuss our options with Henry. Sometimes I ask him rhetorically about what he thinks we should do, and sometimes I use him as a sounding board. Many times we can skirt around the water and/or mud, but there are other times when we have no other option but to go straight through. In those times I always tell Henry that 'sometimes you just have to go through the mud in life buddy.' Those times the surrounding brush is too dense to walk through, or the mud looks a little more slippery around the edges, but for whatever the reason sometimes its just simpler to go right through it.

The same is often true about life, though we never like to admit. Sometimes in our paths of life we often only have options of not good and bad and worse, in those moments we hopefully choose the best of the bad, because sometimes getting a little dirty is better than getting completely lost.

I recently had the task of writing a short essay about hope, and I wrote that often there is an aspect of irrationality that goes along with hope, after all hope is often found when we have no other option. Growth is often the same way, as they say you learn a lot more from failure than success.

In my case Henry's case I hope that I can walk with him when he has to walk through the mud, giving him an ear or a shoulder or someone to carry him through. Because when we walk through the mud currently I am the only one who gets dirty, my shoes get a little heavier and mud splatters on my legs some, but Henry is none the wiser because his journey doesn't change. There's a lesson about how God sometimes carries us in there somewhere, but it sounds like a slightly overused poem about footprints, so I'll leave for you to think about.

Peace and Love,
Pastor K