My surprise party

{a little story}

God sees in secret.

In May, I changed my morning running rhythm, running a little bit farther to reward myself with a recovery walk through a hidden snatch of a local park. This meant a longer run through a path that had become a veritable jungle this summer. It was beautiful but overgrown — I got snagged on spiderwebs and was well-visited by starved and lonely mosquitos.

It was worth it. The woods were unruly but majestic, and the prize was a soft gravel path lined by white picket fences and wide-open fields at the end.

In the background of these runs has been a long, unrelenting hard. You know this if you’ve read my writing on SOAR. And these quiet walks with God have been a part of my survival — just the birds and my tears and Him out there in the wilderness of my heart. It’s been long enough and become familiar enough that we’re (actually) beginning to mine for the joy in it. (And we’re finding that joy. Truly.) But that doesn’t negate that any form of prolonged hard can feel as if it creates a chasm between you and the outside world, which surely knows of pain but not your particular brand of pain.

Pain hides us.

Nate and I have held each other in this pain (something I don’t take for granted), and we’ve had a handful of other friends who know and deeply love us right here …

But pain, no matter how shared, can still leave you feeling hidden within your story. A dear friend described it as walking around with a shard of glass in your heart — no one sees, but you know.

So when I walked out the door on the morning of my birthday for my run through that tangle of the woods that was worth it for the small snatches of beauty and the prize at the end, I felt the shard. The same way I felt it at pilates class earlier in the week, and walking the aisles of Home Goods watching girls load their mom’s carts for their college dorm rooms, and playing “motorboat” one last time with Char in the pool before it closed for the fall.

I didn’t name it. I didn’t need to. It was there — the shard is always there.

At just about 2 miles, I crested the last hill of my run, relieved that the rest was downhill, and slid under the gate into the path through the woods.

But something was different.

I didn’t stop — this is the part of my run where I pick up my pace downhill. But something was different. The path was wide, much wider than days before when I’d run it. There were no cobwebs, overgrowth, or underbrush.

Was I on a different path?