From the time I was a very small girl, I would often take long walks in the forest behind my grandparents’ house. There I explored and prodded the natural world – the way sodden, downed tree branches eroded within the earth and housed centipedes in their hollows, the way the thin sound of creek water skimmed the shale rock beneath it, and the way the sunlight exposed the quilted pattern of the leaves.
Such walks were quiet times, often taken alone. As a respite from my social world, I took these opportunities to look both inward and outward all at once. I remember in those woods first feeling a sense of other worldliness – that above the chaos and decay of the natural order was a wholeness binding me, my thoughts, feelings, and the life coursing through me, with all else that was created.
It makes sense then, if only looking back on it now, in an all-too-rare moment of grateful introspection, that I first came to know God through nature – standing on a balcony in Ahmedabad, India, a lost 16-year-old on my first international trip – unable to sleep during a rainstorm. I was struggling with my dislocation from country and family, agnosticism, and an immense fear of the future. I did not see the purpose of my life, juxtaposed with the lives of so many suffering souls I saw on the streets of India every day that summer. The economics, politics, and other broken systems of the world had clouded what I first saw in the woods as a child – the wholeness in the backdrop, the wholeness keeping us together in spite of ourselves. An insomniac, yearning teenager, I watched a deluge of God’s rain from the balcony, and I heard the words I would later read and believe in more than any others, the ascended Christ’s message to his children, “I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Returning home from India, I attended church with a friend. I watched the Discovery Channel, read apologetics and meditated over the bible. I fought myself, and plenty of others, trying to intellectually assent to miracles and mysteries that are not meant for my human understanding. And in eight years of time, on August 1, 2009, I came to believe that the patient and perfect Jesus Christ was the risen Son of God, and that through him – the greatest manifestation of love that I have ever experienced – all my failings, faults and brokenness are redeemed. Less than a month later, I moved to Massachusetts and started my adult life.
Jesus has walked with me through so much. His love and beauty chase me every day of my life. I am so grateful for his grace and mercy, his justice and his hope. I am so thankful for my relationship with him, and alongside his creation, the coming kingdom of God that we joyfully celebrate together today and always.
