In 1971, alone in a cow pasture, not far from Eastern Oregon College in La Grande, Oregon, I accepted the reality of Christ and surrendered my will to His. It was the summer of my senior year and for the first time in my life God was more than a mutable cosmic speculation. He was real; He was tangible; He was with me. I brought Him home, we ate together, and the next night God and I returned to the cow pasture with my sleeping bag and together we shared the adventure of trust. This is the record of that night:
Of Sleeping Near Woods
I hear a tapping in the woods.
Yet dusk hides it from my sight
Leaving it to my ears
And to my faith, that it means me no harm.
What causes the branches to crackle so?
My eyes can’t tell me.
And my ears tell me only that there are branches that crackle.
Yet, my faith tells me that it is a crackling in the woods.
And not of a branch that hands have touched.
And this if nothing else is good.
For nothing adorns the sound.
It is no less and no more than what it is.
It’s purpose for God and nature to know.
And it is mine, while not to see it,
Yet to believe.
In like manner:
I feel a prickling at the knee.
No doubt some bug descends on me.
My choice … to brush it off or not.
But for the dark I can’t see,
And were it just a blade of grass
It would prickle just the same.
No pain, but yet a presence.
Something besides me …
Having business with my knee.
What business it is I don’t know.
For what does it matter?
When, through its knowledge, I may be alarmed;
By faith it is merely a prickling.
While, in truth, it may have the means to give discomfort.
Still, by faith it does no harm.
And when I awake in the morning,
No scars upon my knee,
And the tapping sound had long since gone;
Yet, I wonder what may have lurked this night before?
Whether by wild beasts I was surrounded,
And my faith delivered me,
Or just a trick of winds and grass.
No matter … for what ever it was
God wrestled…
And won.
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