2025.11.05

The Path

Hanging over my fireplace is a painting my dad bought for my mom when I was a kid. It is one of many painted by a lady who worked at the little liquor store at the bottom of Diamond Hill. My mom loved Carol’s landscapes and had a few, with two of them now residing in our home. This painting was untitled, so I gave it a name: The Path.

It is an unpaved path lined on both sides with trees, and seems to drift off the canvas on the horizon. It doesn’t need to tell you its location nor reveal what is beyond the horizon. Isn’t that how life is? Do we really know what is just beyond the bend? When I think about the paths I have traveled in life, I think about what God knew about each twist and turn.

I spent my childhood and teenage years on Diamond Hill, and my college years were a mishmash of locations and adventures. The first lease “J” and I shared as a married couple was just across the street from a beach on Long Island Sound, and our first house was on Schwink’s Hill. We had no idea what was just ahead of us on the path. But God did!

There was the cul-de-sac on the edge of Amish Country and then a circle of townhouses on a seminary campus. We lived next to the church and a park in the center of a midwestern town in farm country, and then above the Monongahela River in the rust belt. Then there was the church’s house on Main Street, some fifty miles from the Big Apple. We had no idea what was just ahead of us on the path. But God did!

Now, Mayhem, “J”, and I walk out the front door and down an unpaved driveway to an unpaved path lined with trees on both sides on a ridge in the White Mountains. You can’t see beyond the horizon, but you know there’s something (and SOMEONE) out there that awaits us!