Where Should I Go But To The Lord?

Today I asked where the Lord was and a preacher came running.

Short of breath, with a damp, sweaty shirt pulled over his body, he said he was there to answer my question.

But he never did say where the Lord was.

He only asked, "What can I do?"

So I one-arm hugged him, despite his sweaty shirt, and said , "You're kind for coming, but there's nothing you can do."

"I'm here to help," he insisted, staring at me through his rectangular new glasses.

"Really," Said I.  "I'm fine."

But in my mind I wondered, was he telling me he's as close to the Lord as I'm ever going to get?

Because I remember long afternoons, much like this one, filled with hard work and music and Nature, that seemed to draw the very breath of God across my own damp skin.  

The Lord seems closer to me in the chirp of crickets and the croaks of tree frogs than in the hot wind of a preacher, hurrying to let me know where the Lord is.

There's a sunset to this day.  Blessed day!  It has an ending abundantly more beautiful than its beginning.  And isn't that the way of life, after all? 

I sit here on my front porch, listening to the night chorus tune up for its performance, to begin in earnest once the sun goes behind that hill over there.  

God's breath is cool, a comfort at the end of a hard journey, even one that only lasts from daylight to twilight. 

The reflection of all things holy, shines back at me from every window.  For it's in the growing, the tending, the dying and the rising up again that the Divine makes itself seen and known.

If one only cares to truly find it, or know it, or take it in.

The Lord abides in the grace it took for me to live this, this minute by minute bit of survival.  In the work of my hands that ache and beg me to quit.  In the fruit of my labors, that bid me keep going.  In the mercy of a sun going down, the heat of a July day finally relenting.

The Lord was in the sweat I washed down the drain as I stood naked before God in my shower, singing to keep from weeping.

The Preacher, well he left as quick as he came, no doubt running off intending with all good will, to carry the Lord with him, on his back or in his sweat or in his gaze. 

But the Lord didn't leave with him, anymore than the Lord hitch-hiked in on his shoulders.  

Bless his heart.  He doesn't know.

The Lord is found, for all of us, wherever we last left her.