Samba per Vinicius

Budding trees in Georgia

Sometimes God seems so good I can hardly bear it. Like today, on the last day of Lent. I’m driving through Alabama bottomland, by the chicken houses, past the green, green grass of home, into the sunset. Old Ford pickups pass the van, going in the opposite direction.

Days like today, the quest feels possible. Doable. Like something that could be right here, in my hand. I’m heading back to Bucks Hollow State Park, where I shivered all night in January. Where I proved to myself that I wanted this badly enough.

All things seem possible. I hypothesized today about building Thoreau’s cabin. His exact cabin. Why couldn’t I? He went to the woods to live deliberately, and that’s what I want to do, too. His ongoing themes of self-reliance and transcendentalism are exactly what I believe in, exactly what today’s America has lost hold of. I want to be his heir, theoretically and practically.

I want to live deliberately, the way he did. I’m finishing the day outside, in the woods, under the stars, out of a van. Exactly the life I want. Is that so odd? Maybe yes.

Consider the lilies of the field. They neither labor nor spin. But even Solomon in all of his glory was not arrayed such as them. (Even Solomon!!) How beautiful is that? If I can only believe I’m as beautiful as the lilies of the field, that God believes in me as much as He does in them. It’s the green fuse that drives the flower upward, into the light, just as I am being driven upward into the light.

My parents used to pray for me, every day, that God would guide my steps. That He’d draw me in the way I should go. I’m sure they still do. As my theology has drifted from theirs, they’ve doubted me and my path. But what if God has been answering their prayer all along? What if I’ve been following His path all along?

It’s the last day of Lent. I can stop blogging after today. But I don’t think I want to. Lent has proved to me a lot of things, and one of them is the goodness of God. Every time I experience joy He proves Himself to me. I want to celebrate the life that I’m living—the odd, hare-brained, ten-year-old jeans and flip-flops, homeless-person-experience life that God has given me. Because it’s the best life I can imagine.