Providential Relationships

He sees me wince, grab my lower back with one hand, balance the cup steeping tea in the other.  Leans over to grab a cup and asks if the low back pain is normal for me. I tell him it usually happens when I’m doing something new I’ve never done before, like this coach training session we’re doing together.

This man who fell out of a window and flies free from the cocoon of pain, he tells me the body often remembers what the mind forgets. The same physical response happens in similar circumstances, he tells me. “Do you remember it, the first time you held yourself tight doing something new,” he asks.

And right there, over the table of cream and sugar I remember it, like God pulling out a forgotten chapter in the story of my life.

When it All Started

A few months into her fifteenth year, she boards a Greyhound bus for the first time.  She hoists an oversized brown teddy bear and small suitcase up the steps, navigating the narrow aisle.  Her eyes ping pong back to front, side to side, assessing open seats avoiding eye contact with strangers.

She takes a seat next to the window, stares at the crowd below watching couples kiss, families wrap remembering around shoulders one last time.  Worries the community she leaves behind will forget her. Prays the new one won’t reject her.

The bear, a gift from friends at her going away party the night before, it sits in the aisle seat next to her blocking off the odd and strange.

On this day, pressed against cold glass, she holds herself tight in fear.

Pivotal Circumstances

I put the tea down on the table to catch my breath. The man whose new home is healing, he whispers a quiet prayer among the others pouring coffee, grabbing napkins. And I cross the threshold into letting go of what holds tight from the past when I sit back down in my office chair, lean back against the towel wrapped ice pack.

That bus carried me from Missouri to Oklahoma. To the one bedroom apartment stacked with Barry Manilow eight tracks on the table across from the cot I slept on for two years beside my Aunt Paula. Because I love my mother, not what the alcohol did to both of us.

Fear loosened its grip the day I stood on concrete halos of exhaust and held hands with security. But my body never forgot.

And that providential meeting in a fifteen minute break around a skirted table in the corner, it wet the ground of dormant seeds. And faith sprouted.

Now, when God extends a platter of pivotal circumstance to try, my body remembers and sighs peace. He was with me on the bus. He is with me now.  I taste and see that the Lord is good.

Who in your life has God used to grow your faith? Will you join me in thanking God for them?

Linking with Ann, Michelle and Laura.


This is the eighth post in the series 31 Days of Letting Go. You can read the collective here. If you are a writer, I invite you to link up any post you’ve written on the theme of letting go in the comments here on Friday. Subscribe to receive the series in your inbox or feed by adding your address in the side bar under Follow Redemptions Beauty.