Where Streams Flow
A few weeks ago, my friend Sarah and I returned to Bowen Island. She hadn't been back in ten years; it had been about five for me. A decade had passed since we left the island like Lot out of Sodom and Gomorrah, running up the hill from the cafe to the moving trucks as the ferry line started to board without us. I'd been back to Bowen a couple times in winter to stay at Rivendell retreat centre at the top of Cates Hill, but always without my car, so it was difficult to visit old haunts.
On Friday evening (after I picked Sarah up from the Vancouver airport very annoyed at my own inability to follow GPS) we walked in Headwaters Park. L'Abri, the sort-of retreat/study centre where we'd met, had been in walking distance from the park, and we'd often wandered there. But we didn't want to see how the homestead was ten years later, after it had been sold to someone else. Some memories are best left intact. We just walked the familiar paths between hemlock and alder, beside ice-crusted ponds. "Wasn't that weird stone circle up there?" "Doesn't that path lead to a clearing?" Memory trickled back toward us.
Sarah and I have discussed how some places, the dear but infrequent ones, serve as markers for seasons in one's life. I moved with L'Abri from Bowen Island to my home of Vancouver Island, worked there for years, and now live three minutes away. So L'Abri isn't a marker for me the way it is for others. But Bowen Island still is. My former colleagues spent eight years there and came to dread the sodden winters overshadowed by tall trees, nothing to do but visit the library or one of two cafés.
For me, Bowen never became familiar enough to breed contempt. Even in winter when the alders are bare and the bays we used to swim in are frigid, I see Bowen through the lens of June: roadsides festooned with foxgloves and daisies, beach fires and canoe trips, and swims in the phosphorescent sea. It's like a high school sweetheart you dated just long enough to imagine he might have some issues, then he moved away and left you pining.
Sarah calls the west coast "God's country". Because she lives across the Canada/US border a day's drive away and has a husband and daughter now, we only manage to see each other once or twice a year. My visits with her have become markers too, as we reflect on the changes that have passed since our last visit. When we lived together on Bowen, our biggest struggle was both having a crush on the same fellow student, who's now married with two children of his own. Time has given us many more occasions to cry, over things that seem far more insurmountable. And many unexpected joys have come our way. Yet Sarah is still that girl who slipped little notes under my door, reassuring me she still wanted to be friends despite the boy and hoping I felt the same.
On Saturday we sat at Artisan Eats, eating pastries and journalling. Artisan Eats looks out across Howe Sound up to the snow-flecked steep North Shore Mountains. I've recently discovered my recipe for happiness is pastries + friends + nature, so this moment was the one I'd fantasized about. As I sat looking out the window and reflecting on the past decade, I felt a deep sense of God's goodness behind and before me.
I'd come to Bowen in part to consider a new season of my life. Since I left L'Abri a year-and-a-half ago, I've been reflecting on what God's calling me to prioritize now. At L'Abri, my life revolved around hospitality: making beds, cooking, gardening, and holding the stories of the guests who came. Now I live alone. In some ways it's a blessed relief after the high turnover rate of people I often came to hold dear. I know what to expect when I come home at the end of the day. But I still miss hearing laughter from the student breakfast downstairs when I wake up, or the way people lean together in a particularly revealing lunch discussion.
I love hospitality: I enjoy a mix of people, have come to find small-talk easy (a big accomplishment for an awkward homeschooled girl), enjoy the domestic arts, and don't mind a bit of chaos. I've meant to carry hospitality forward, but since I left L'Abri, opportunities have diminished. Work and school have kept me busy, and I live just a little too far out of the city to be accessible to people in town. I've kept trying to host events, but the turnout has been rather sad. I've wondered, "What's happening to my gift?"
My dad has always said, "Go where it's flowing." I take this to mean where the Spirit is moving and inviting you to go. Sometimes we assume our calling or gifts will stay the same in each season. But sometimes God builds a dam and diverts the flow. On Bowen I watched the little late-winter streams flow under logs and around rocks to the ocean. One seemed to get lost as it crossed a path. Maybe I've been trying to keep a stream flowing that's gone underground for now. That doesn't mean it's gone forever, only that other things might be coming to the fore. I want to find those streams and clear them of debris rather than lamenting the dried stones of a seasonal creek.
I'll be moving to attend grad school in the fall, which will take most of my attention for a few years. That's much of my vocation this season. But, after seven years where L'Abri absorbed most of my creativity, I'm also starting to see more opportunities for writing. I've never been a good self-promoter; I don't even have social media. Yet unexpected invitations are coming my way. And I'm remembering how much I love this, this shaping of words and ideas and the dialogue with those who read them. I have no plan for where this might go; it wasn't something I intended to pursue much right now. But I've caught a glimpse of a stream and I want to attend to it. My attempts to sit down and write each Sunday are part of my effort to respond to where the Spirit might be flowing.
When I went to Bowen I expected to make a list of my priorities, careful not to waste the moments of my "one wild and precious life". I value intentionality. But sometimes it can become a burden, a hypervigilant attempt to never miss what God has for me. In my late thirties, I'm now "middle-aged", which is hard to believe. I remember so well when I first joined L'Abri. I walked across the field with wildflowers in one hand and theology books in the other, thinking, "This is my life!" There was a fresh excitement then, a sense of possibility. But now there's a settledness I never had in my 20s. I like my life better now, yet I have a new awareness of how short life is. I sit with my 99-year-old grandma and wonder what I'll be proud of or regret when I'm her age.
On the cloudy Sunday, Sarah and I walked the ocean trail on Cape Roger Curtis, praying silently on the way there and aloud together on the way back. I pondered Psalm 23. What does it mean for goodness and mercy to follow us? I think of two sheepdogs keeping us on the path as they respond to the shepherd. So often I'm dogged instead by worry or shame. What if "keeping in step with the Spirit" isn't about constantly trying to maximize your time, afraid you might miss an invitation from God and get off track? What if instead it's responding to goodness—attending to where God's goodness is flowing, letting goodness and mercy guide you?
We reached the mossy point near the little white lighthouse and sat on the bare, damp rocks overlooking the Salish Sea. The torn blue edge of Vancouver Island's mountains floated on the horizon. I told Sarah the thoughts I'd had as I'd prayed, and tears welled up. Life seems too short sometimes to do everything I want to do. And yet God holds it, he holds it all, and will be with me even when I'm in the shadowed valleys. There's a "forever" in his house, a river to which all the streams of this life will join and continue to flow.
