(9)

Lost

He’d not met them before but there they were,
obviously lost.
They’d found a remote cabin along the river
all right
but it was the wrong cabin and the wrong river.
They had to drive back to the turn-off,
take a left and go a couple of miles further
until they saw the mail box and driveway.
They had been warned.
The place they were looking for was in a valley,
too hot in the summer,
too cold in winter
for city folks from Littleton.

In most works of fiction you don’t think about it.
The plot’s been laid and the story told.
The end is what it is.
You can even skip ahead and find what you
can’t wait to know.
Here, though, the lost couple’s story has not
been completed.
It’s only the first chapter.
They could get into a peck of trouble yet
just like we do in real life
but in this case, unlike ours, the author calls
the shots.

If I were the author I’d want the couple,
after a wild excursion or two,
to find their way to safety.
If I were God, I’d want their safety, too,
which, of course, is a big assumption
since I’m not.
Authors play God, are God, within the world
of their novels,
creating plots, developing characters, contriving
appropriate endings.
God doesn’t play God, it pleases me to think,
letting others,
over the centuries, do the writing for Him or Her,
creating and contriving, in turn.

It would be a wondrous moment, I would think,
were the two to converge,
the novelist’s tappings and God’s revealers,
using different words,
and different images,
speaking to the same redemptive truths,
reality and God breathing the same air
and love finding love in the center
of things.

God’s nature is such that it can only love. It can do nothing
more. In its love, it yearns perpetually for a faithful response
in a world of free will and choice.

 

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