by Kim Nentrup
It was God to you. The
expansive, eye-filling Lake Michigan, with its moodiness and its billion diamond
sparkles at dusk. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, the
sparkles became the different aspects of God,
all the things one could ever learn about Him, and how they were significant,
each one. You grieved each time you left the lake, because you knew that your mind could not remember the pure beauty
of Him for a whole year, until summer vacation brought you back again.
It was the next summer you
lost your faith. It happened slowly, like a trickle of water over a slate-bottomed creek in a drought. First, after an evangelist's wife confided in you that she did not believe in hell, you realized you also did not believe in hell. God was pure beauty--hell was an inconsistent ugliness. Then you read and read and read about the origins of the
Bible, and started to realize that it was no longer truth to you. You talked to
a preacher and confessed you didn’t believe Jesus was God at all. He looked at
you with pity. Then you cried, sobbing over Jesus not being there with you
anymore, not loving you unconditionally, not making all things work together
for good.
You were sad as your husband
and you drove up the long dirt drive to the lake cabin.
You helped bring the luggage and baskets of towels and flip flops and linens
into the house. Then you knew it was time. It was the annual first look. You
had to walk about fifteen feet up a hill to see the lake.
You walked up that hill
thinking that the lake might not even be there. How
could it be? But as the blue sky revealed itself and the deeper blue line of
horizon revealed itself and then the shore, and the grasses, you saw that it
was there. And it was morning, and the breeze was just so, no longer the Holy Spirit
caressing you, but still cool on your face. And you walked down the steps, all
64 of them, to the sand and kicked off your shoes.
There was a washed up log
and you sat down on it, feeling the warmed sand, and you put your head in your
hands and you cried. It was a grieving cry for an old friend who had died.
The sobbing went on for
some time. You thought of the time that you stood talking to the lake
and praising it for its magnificence. You wondered at how odd that seemed now.
You looked to the left toward the lighthouse and saw it was still there. You
looked to the right to the bend of the land and saw it was still there. It was
all still there. It was there for you. It hadn’t left you.
You stepped into the cold
July water, up to your knees, and let the tiny waves lap against you. You
needed to dive in and be re-baptized in this water of disbelief. But you
weren’t going to do that. You just felt it on your legs and said that would be
enough.
Every year before, every
time you had to turn to leave the lake and head
for the stairs for a sandwich or a nap, or to leave for the summer, it was the
hardest thing. The lake sang a siren song, once a deity singing comfort, but now, when you turned to walk up the
stairs, you felt the breeze was just a breeze on your
back, no longer God's spirit. The rush of
the waves was not a whisper of truth, but a lovely sound
of nature. The sparkles on the tips of the waves from the shore to the horizon
were not points of holiness, but simple, heart-filling beauty.
You knew the lake would exist in your mind all year. It wasn't going to leave, and it was enough.