Valleys and Pavement

It was the summer of my 12th year of life. ‘We need to turn back,’ I heard Dad say as the horse steadily pressed forward up the rocky mountain path above a steep slope containing small bushes in the rocky soil. The slope fell away to aspens and evergreens in the spruce valley below. Somewhere along the way, the reel had fallen off a fly rod packed onto the horse which bore us away to a secluded cabin in a pristine valley in Northwestern Colorado. I didn’t quite understand what had been lost that Dad was talking about, but as we mounted the trail I saw a reel to the fly rod resting near a rock about 20 feet down the slope. ‘What do you want to be called?,” he asked afterward, naming a couple of admirable American Indian names which reflected my keen eyesight at the time. Making a choice, “I like Eagle Eye” I replied. Several years later I would revisit that valley and ride a log down the river with a young horse wrangler helping guide the trip. I remember eating trout cooked under the branches of a large tree sheltering us from a storm. As life goes on, the storms can get tougher. Those were the easy times.

I peer out the window onto the wet pavement running up the street to where Cambodians live in run down houses which probably should be condemned. Across the street is an old three-story wooden house with white paint peeling off the slats. It is part of a ministry for men who are coming out of prison to help get them back on their feet. About a year earlier I moved into this ministry to help with the children. After a summer living there as an intern, the program ended, but I asked to stay on to pray for and encourage the men coming in. There was nothing more I would have rather done. I moved into the second floor of another house on the property. There were two small rooms connected by a small kitchen. Two of my roommates had been in prison. I don’t know about the third. He never spoke to me, even though I still tried to say ‘hello’ at times.

There were two twin beds on each side of my room with about 4 feet in between. There was no closet, so my roommate hung his clothes on a rack along the wall. There was not much room left when I got there, so I had to store my things on the stairwell next to our room going down to an unused and perhaps uninhabitable first floor. My roommate was black and I was white, and we were both named Brent. Fortunately, he spoke to me. Often I could hear rap music banging out of his headphones while he lay on his bed. We had some good conversations and partook of jailhouse stew, a combination of hot dogs and other things, that he and one of my other roommates made. His life growing up was not the same as mine. His Dad was not at home and he did not have the chances that I had. He did his ‘time’ and got a job refinishing furniture at a small business a few blocks away.

The men in the 3 story intake house meet every weekday morning at 6am for worship and prayer in the chapel. The chapel is a long room about 35 feet wide with rows of chairs from front to back, and an aisle in the middle. Breakfast is served at 5:30am; prayer and worship begins promptly at 6am. Each meeting time begins with a reading of a chapter in Proverbs, corresponding to the current day of the month. The fruits of the Spirit begin with love, joy, and peace. When the tape player began playing those gospel songs through the sound system, I could feel the Spirit of God in that room. ‘Never Alone… I am never alone…’ filled the air in melodious, upbeat, rhythmic chorus. I have always loved music which moves the soul and this was it. It was an inner-city brotherhood, a gospel monastery of men, some of them willing to fight for their lives against an enemy which is not physical. The battle is in the spiritual and in times like those, the enemies of discouragement and depression are defeated. C.S. Lewis once gave an analogy of food. Every one yearns for meaning in their life. The fact that we get hungry for food shows that we were made to eat food. The fact that we are hungry for meaning shows that we are made to have meaning. And if we are made to have it, then that means it must exist. It means all of our lives have meaning, a great purpose. But how does one explain the suffering that exists? Why do we long for story? Could it be because we are made to live in a story? Why do we want to be heroes? Could it be that we are meant to be heroes in a story that has real and lasting consequences?