The Woods

Today I walked into the small woods in my backyard for the first time in a while. It used to seem so much bigger when I was younger, but I guess that’s true of everything. I remember spending days in those woods with my friend Nate. We would pretend we were soldiers, explorers, bounty hunters. You name it and we probably pretended we were it.

 I remember just walking in those woods was an adventure. There was always something new to discover. In the summer that meant fighting through the thorns and plant life, while the winter held cold, snow and ice. Clearings were made into staging areas, the stream into a vast expanse to be crossed and the hills into mountains to be scaled.

 Today, it was none of those. I went in there to take some pictures and video of the stream sparkling in the noonday sun. But the sense of wonder was gone, replaced with only nostalgia. If this is what growing up means, I have to say I miss being a kid sometimes.

But maybe it wasn’t the forest that shrunk, but my perception of it. It wasn’t mysterious or frightening anymore. It was no longer a struggle to find my way around. Does that change what it is? No.

 It seems like the older you get, the easier it is to lose the sense that things are still bigger than your life. People come and go, issues continue to haunt you and everyone on every side is telling you what it means to be successful. And there I stand, just as confused as I was a kid, but pretending that all is fine so much better. Somewhere along this way, I’ve made God small.

 He no longer is big and mysterious, because I’ve been down the same road so many times. I’ve thanked Him for His grace over and over, but I think I stopped truly appreciating a long time ago. I’ve written so many blogs about my failings and sat back thinking that that act alone would somehow atone for them. I’ve prayed He would take my life and relationships and serve Him with them, but created a little box in which certain things happen that I know will serve God.

 I would love to tell you all that after I left the woods I had some miraculous revelation and they regained their mystique, but that would be a lie. I don’t think they will ever have the same significance in my life again. I also can’t tell you that God dropped down from heaven and showed me how big and amazing He truly is, because that would also be false. But He may have freed my mind from the trap it has been in, and that’s the first step.