When You're Just a Tad Overwhelmed ....

I'm standing at the counter, day seeping in without knocking, jotting down a list of the day's tasks, the work of a week, in my journal, and it's just a tad overwhelming and I am trying to remember just to breathe...

And then I am fifteen, that summer I grip the handlebars of a Honda Goldwing, weave around margarine tubs set up as pylons in the backyard.







Thread through four white Gay-lea markers, loop around the Manitoba Maple, slip through another four tubs, circle a knot of slender poplars, begin again on the far side, under the lilacs.

Come the end of the day, my Dad would lean up against the doorway of the shop, cap peak pulled low, just watching, nodding now and then. Mama would look up from scrubbing potatoes, her face framed by the kitchen window lace valance. And I'd wobble a motorcycle through an obstacle course.

We all knew that, for me, climbing up on that seat, gripping those handle bars, wasn’t about speed or finesse.

It was about fear.

About swimming through murky cold fear. And surfacing to breathe. Fear of plunging, fear of falling, fear of pain, fear of handling a revving engine and a mass of steel, fear of accelerating, the open road and all the unknown.

Dad was like that. He didn’t like us saying there was something we couldn’t do: weld, drive a motorcycle, pick up a phone, back up a tractor with a wagon behind it, open your mouth to say hello.

If you couldn’t do something, then that was the day to begin.

I was, and am still, his most fearful child. The child most like him.







“Just keep it steady. Balance it, like you’re riding a bike: don’t oversteer…or panic. Just flow. Lean into the curves…. And the throttle is right here.”

His smile lingers long after he steps back, hands filling Wrangler pockets, waiting. Waiting for me to gulp hard and ease off the clutch.

The roar of my heart drowns out the idling engine. I grimace, gnaw on the edge of my lip… and let go. The bike lurches. White knuckles weld to the handlebars, calf muscles, taut and trembling, shove knees into the gas tank, like a lanky kid clinging to a cracking limb. I am just that. Way out on a limb.

A whole string of twilight practices, my shadow falling long and dark across the lawn, see me bobble, dangle, jolt, hang on.

Dad nods…shakes his head…chuckles…sighs. And I want to holler across the yard to him, “I told you so!”

I told you I am just too scared, too tight, too… tight with fear.

Light fading one summer evening, Dad closes the shed door and walks across the gravel yard, his scuffed, untied workboots stopping at lawn’s edge. I manage, barely, to brake just before him. He waits while I pull off the helmet before he speaks.

“Move over.” I know that look of steely resolve. I hand him the helmet.

The harvested wheat field is ours. We curve around behind the barns and set off for the hill along the far fenceline. Dad gracefully leans the bike down and lets her glide, this way, then that. He calls over his shoulder, “See how you just let her go? Flow with her.”

Dad gently curves down towards the woods, and I follow. I lean too. I don’t brace, I don’t stiffen. I lean into the curve.

“That’s it. However she leans, you lean too.”

Dad accelerates and the Gold Wing purrs. The wind whips, alive, through my hair. The land rises to meet me; I sink down into her. We are merging with the topography, the crest and hollow of land. Our shadow tows close, rising and falling across the golden stubble.

Looping, weaving, soaring, we circle back by Cooper’s fence.

“Feel how she moves?”

I'm not stiff. I become one with the curves and the turns and the hills and the valleys. I release my grip, my fears.... I bend. I'm surrendered to the adventure of the now.

Our long shadows across the field mirror what I feel.

Fluid.





I stand in a kitchen with a list in hand and a calendar on the wall and countless tasks pressing on the mind, and I take a deep breath, loosen the shoulders, stay fluid, let go and lean.

Lean back into Him.

Life's an adventure when we move as He moves. When I'm fluid and surrendered to Christ and the topography of now.

I can feel the wind in my hair.




Lord God, just for today, cause me to stay fluid, to live surrendered. Just to let go and lean into it, just as it comes. Just as You come.

Photos: our boys stalking through the woods this week, lion and tiger, living the wild adventure
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