February 2019
We met in the mists of time, and though he did not see me as clearly as I saw him, he saw me well enough to know that I could be of help to him. It is not easy to ask an individual of independent mind to accept help; he seeks more often to give it.
I once felt the same fear. And so I knew with instinct and from ingrained experience the flinching away from permitting another person to come close to a heart that has been mangled and mauled to the point of no longer wishing the human touch.
It was with a bold stride of defiant courage that I walked away from him, in the way that someone who had loved me had walked away from me, and waited for me to understand the depths of my own pain, and the profound nature of his love.
We often believe that helping a person is an act of performing a favor or enacting assistance or even showing kindness. There are times, many times, when the gift is in the distance, the patience that says:
I believe in you. I know that you can straighten up and fly right, if only you can look to the sky, if only you turn toward the Light.
Love is felt in the pauses between the words just as much it is sensed in the words spoken. The mists of time are meant to hide from us the doubts that cloud our belief in ourselves and impede our call to action. We then can seize the moment and fulfill our conviction in the way of things to work out, God willing.
God is always willing to hear whatever you cannot say aloud, whatever you cannot even bear to think. In those mists of time, all is understood and revealed.
And in the mists of time, my friend came to know his own serenity and I felt his love abundantly. For a writer to prefer silence to speech is the infinite test of faith. Of such faith is fiction spun as the writer strives toward poetic truth.