NEW ROADS, OLD FEARS
Jason Christopher Hackwith
Change is a new road.
The twists and turns, the dips and valleys, the hills that you have yet to climb; they are all unknowns. When you step into a new road, it can feel like you are all alone. Change can leave us breathless and reeling; staggering from step to step, looking frantically down this unknown path and back from which we came. Which way was it again? We're lost.
I've been lost before. Many times. When I was in college I used to absolutely hate driving through Portland because I would always get lost. This is, of course, way before GPS was a thing. I had maps, but they didn't help me very much and I'd end up talking to a bored cashier in a gas station trying to get some help. I recall on two separate occasions someone deliberately giving me the wrong directions. I wonder who hurt them. Probably tired of all the tourists. Maybe it was more interesting than putting out that new cigarette display. So I'd go down the wrong road a ways until I ran into someone kind enough to steer me true. Eventually I'd get going in roughly the right direction long enough to figure it out.
When I was a kid, I got briefly lost in the woods with two friends on a church camping trip to the Priest Lake area in Idaho. We followed Indian Creek and danced around hidden pools and talked long into the summer day about the forest as it existed before it was found by so many footsteps. We got pretty turned around until one of us (I am certain it was not me) suggested we go toward where we heard cars on a road which led us back to the campground and our families and friends.
We followed our ears and I remember thinking about how someone years ago perhaps heard the sound of water and, upon finding a stream, followed it to see where the water would lead them. We laughed and waxed eloquent about the stories the woods could tell if anyone bothered to listen. It was a grand old time and a fine adventure.
Funny thing about roads, though. Each step you take, someone has taken before. That winding, old creek? The water merely went where it fell. The path by it, now disappearing almost as swiftly as it appeared? It followed the water. The old highway that led us home? It didn't get to be a road all by itself, now, did it? Each unknown footfall was felt by someone just as afraid, just as lost; just as alone. Just like you. Just like me.
One more step. Together.
“Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
I step across the threshold and am changed;
The house behind me shivers, barely stands
As twisted lines of meaning now collapse
And fall into the spaces left behind:
New structures made for something yet unseen,
Unknown to me. I am what I am not,
And in this unmade bed of reason fall;
I sleep again beneath the Master’s hand.
New roads before me stretch into the deep,
Each pebble is a universe, and I
A single grain of sand. There is no pearl,
No shining seed of beauty to be held,
Only an irritation for the soul;
And this, my soul’s itch, cancerous and foul,
The throbbing pain of wounds left by the Fall,
My tears revealed for ruin or for life.
The step is made, and should I now regret?
Should I turn back, and embrace death again?
I do not know this road, and I am lost;
I cannot see the light from where I stand.
The way is dark. My path remains unclear,
And yet I place one foot now out ahead
And trust that it will somehow find the ground:
One step, one faith, one love to bear all sin.
© 2001-2025 by JCH
