Waiting for your story

If someday I ever decide to live in one place for more than three months (maybe the nursing home?), there is really just one thing I want in my house.

A window seat.

My grandmother had one in the green-papered room I stayed in as a eight year old, and I’d always clamber up on top, look out at the birch and maple woods, and make up stories of valiant adventure. I was a princess—I was a Jedi—I was a princess and a Jedi. I was being rescued through the glass-paned window—I was fighting some great dark evil—I was riding away on a unicorn.

This window seat was different, Room 220 of Owatonna Microtel Inn and Suites (the room with the Tempur-Pedic bed! the receptionist crowed). The second-story view was of the Fleet Farm gas station and the truck drivers’ parking lot instead of the magical woods with the scrabbling turkeys, but of course I didn’t care, because you can make up adventures about Fleet Farms and truck drivers, too, if you’re practiced enough (and I am quite experienced).

Only I wasn’t making up stories this morning—I was asking the Lord about my own.
Waking the Dead lay next to me, scribbled all over in Barbie-pink pen, bent open to the section on the healing prayer, chapter 8, page 142. The pen marks had paused here as I set the book back down, swirly green cover against flat white sheet.

Lord, what part of my heart is still broken?

I received an instant answer, one word, unmistakable. I continued to question, to search, to let the Lord reach into my heart and tell me why I had not allowed healing there. It had to do with something I deeply wanted, had dreamed of for years.

Why? When will it come? I twisted my fingers into the sheet.

The Voice sliced into my mind.

It will. You’re just not at that part of the story yet.

Sometimes what you want is beautiful and true, a longing the Lord has deeply set within you, and that is holy. The longing for it is real, and it is good. Maybe it has to do with horses or music or marriage, or perhaps a friend or a skill or a dream. Don’t be afraid if it hasn’t yet come. It still may.

Perhaps, you’re just not at that part of your story yet.

Eternity

Footprints through snow, eight inches deep, but the air is too cold to allow water to pool. Just snow—plain snow, old snow—to step through, sink in. Six footprints press from arena gate to ATV-plowed path, and I arrange my feet in them as I go.

Maia steps behind me, chooses one path as I pick out mine. Braided mane, loose rope, and a sparrow picks through hay on the ground.

What are you doing? she asks. Walking to the pasture gate, what else?—but that is the wrong answer.

That is what will happen, but what am I doing?

I am stepping into footprints in the snow.

And when I become present to stepping through snow for no other reason than to be present to stepping through snow, I realize Maia’s breath on my neck and jewels glittering on ice and boots sinking deeper and the weight of the rope on my glove and that someone once said that forever is composed of nows.

When stories are truer than reality

On the flat screen on the wall (just right of the fireplace, just under the horse painting) flickers Shadowfax in the meadow, Rohan of the hills, and Eowyn in the great hall. 

Aragorn: What do you fear, my lady?
Eowyn: A cage. To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valor has gone beyond recall or desire.
~Lord of the Rings


And I sit on a couch of faded blue as the credits trickle down and Enya sings about the West, and I wonder—is this it? Is this life I have chosen all there is—to get up early, to work through the day as the sun brightens and fades, to go to bed early and sleep in the same bed as all the days before, to make enough money to buy the same food to live the same life to cry the same tears until all chance of valor has gone beyond recall or desire?

I cannot believe it.

For if life is less than my greatest dreams, if the truth about this world that goes straight to my soul is a liar, if Middle Earth has more inherit glory than Planet Earth—then fiction is better than reality, my God is not who I believe Him to be, and I dedicate myself to living in my made-up world:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.

And with that decision, life opens to me—all of life—the life that makes this world as wild and breathtaking and terrible and beautiful as any Rivendell or Mordor or Shire. The battles just as great, the risk just as high, and the love just as real. The same cutting feeling of maia that causes me to dig my fingernails into my palms when Sam talks about the great stories, the same desire that makes me curl up and sigh when Eowyn goes to war—those stories only affect me because they were meant for me to live.

I don’t know how to live them, sometimes. But I don’t think that always matters so much, in the end. Because once you believe in the greater stories, the stories seem to then find you.

Aragorn: What do you fear, my lady?
Eowyn: A cage. To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valor has gone beyond recall or desire.
Aragorn: You are a daughter of kings, a shield maiden of Rohan. I do not think that will be your fate.
~Lord of the Rings