Every story has a beginning. Often, a person doesn’t even know it’s the beginning of a story. It’s just a new day. Then a wizard shows up at your door and invites you on an adventure. That’s a noteworthy way to begin a story. But most stories aren’t like that. Even if there are wizards out there, they tend to keep to themselves these days and the adventures of old don’t seem to happen anymore. I’ve never had one at least. Even still, I miss them. I miss the opportunity to go on a quest. What kind of quests do we have? We’re out of milk. Not exactly soul stirring.
Instead of heroes and villains, we have bureaucracy, paperwork, and car repairs. Just a lot of little bothers. Maybe that’s why I love really windy days like today. Cool, crisp fall day, the wind blowing through the pines and the oaks, stirring the needles, shaking the leaves, loosening the yellowing holdouts and taking them on their own journey eventually to the ground. The wind is dramatic, stirring even my mundane soul, lost in its own frustrations and struggling to find hope in a world that’s just wearing and worrying without any sense of value.
We take small things so seriously, wanting to have something stir and move, some kind of cause to take up and fight for, usually more enervating than ennobling. Even Christianity is so plainly mundane, the story of God entering into this world, overcoming sin, calling and empowering to take on a new kind of vision for life and hope, calling to see all of creation as part of this dance, this song, this renewing exultation of the divine and physical reuniting. Here’s your bulletin. Take your seat. Stand up. Sit down. Listen to the sermon. Go in peace.
It’s a square dance.
Week in and week out. Do-Si-Do.
Wearying without end.
Then one day, the wind blows. Stirs. Moves. A little whisper at first, then… something more, bringing a scent with it: salt air, orange blossoms, sage. A story awakening its beginning.
Is it even real? Am I imagining, wanting so much to have something new my nose conspires with my brain?
I don’t know. Not all beginnings are actually real. Some sputter out, too many of those have done that. I love the wind, but I don’t trust it. I want the new story to begin, but I am tired of single chapters and plots cut short just when they were getting interesting. Too many cancellations because of low ratings or some kind of cost-analysis decision. Scenes dropped.
But there’s that wind. That wind. That scent that hits me again, coming from the west. Where from? It doesn’t say. Just gusts and stills, waking.
Waking to what? It’s not a square dance. It’s more wild, more wondering.
There’s not a wizard, but there’s something. Or is there? I want a wizard, someone to tell me how long to wait, what or who to wait for, to get ready.
I think I’m too eager, the wanting turning a hope into a aroma, a weariness of the empty frenzy hearing things that aren’t really there.
But that wind. It’s there. It still stirs. So what of it?
I should probably make some coffee. Do some laundry. Mundane, yeah. But it’s good to be ready, just in case it’s a something and not another nothing.
The thing is I don’t have any more stories in me anymore, not that I can find. Beaten finally by life, stretched thin and snapped, tensions raised then slighted off the edge. Even the failings aren’t that dramatic anymore, reduced to dismissal by those without any credentials or evidence of skill. Gauged as extraneous and reduced to seeking some semblance of favor from the nameless, faceless, storyless, bureaucracy that certainly doesn’t care about who I am or what I’ve tried to do.
The wind gusts, my soul slinks back into old memories, stories started and slushed away. Shushed, mushed. The hope and ambition replaced by anger and woe. Oh? Just whoa! Like horses stopped in mid-gallop, stumbling in the stopping, caught in their reins, knotted up and not free. Where? Just there.
Moses as a prince, frustrated by opportunity given and misconstrued. Tossed out. Joseph faithful, lofty dreams and arrogant leads, enslaved, achieving then finding there’s still lower to go from bottoming out. The iron of the chains in his very soul. Cain? Seeing another get the prize, the attention, the favor when there’s no indication of why? Be watchful Cain, sin is crouching at the door. Don’t open it.
Elijah, victory over the priests of Baal, but what for? Proof that the living God is more real, a great story indeed. But the faithless still hold the power and the wind is with them, not him. Slinks off to a secluded valley, left with his thoughts which aren’t helping. How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Enemy? It’s just life. Don’t be so dramatic. The day after day sorrow, that’s real. The thought wrestling, that’s ever present. But enemy? Like it’s a story worth telling, worth asking after? Whispers not of the wind sneak in behind the hope, a cracked sewer pipe seeping into the freshening stream.
I want the story to be real, I want to have the hope that there’s a meaning, a Way in this all, to hope beyond just the everlasting and eternal, to hope in the near and withheld. That there is an opening, widening and beginning all at once, renewing and favor in the wind that stirs and blows.
Every story has a beginning. But not every whisper or knock or even strongly blowing wind is such a beginning. The wanting doesn’t turn it into a something, the yearning doesn’t open the gated community.
It’s wearying watching. Put on the desert island by a ship I once thought my own, castaway but not alone, which is itself a hope, a hope that there were stories that didn’t end with a whimper but gathered together threads and other tales too. I wait and I watch once more, to see if it’s a beginning or just another day waiting for aweigh.
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