From front porch perch, at table, I sidewise look to watch clouds form on familiar but ever-changing horizon—shadows and light, and one looks almost like a pillar of cloud!

That’s what I feel I need, to lead me clearly through this wilderness of life!

Always the ambivalence, it seems, the push to go, the pull to stay back. This time it’s a writers workshop on social networking, something I’m told I so need, to open up my blog’s front door, hang out the welcome sign.

That’s the push. But the pull backward is the uncertainty, born—not of fear, I feel quite certain, but—of passion for the Christ life now growing for me, hating anything stepping in that path, like stifling interferences that all things enterprise-busy seem to throw up in the way.

But, uncertainty. The thing that nags, “You missed the boat! You didn’t do the promote-a-writer things way back when you were young but chose the other—motherhood and all. And now one thing you can do is speak through blog to any willing listeners, but you don’t even go to learn connection-making, just blog into the air!”

I look for guidance in this thought whirlwind and find only confusion. (What else would one find in a whirlwind?) I seek signs and listen for a word from clouds. I wish that God would write instructions on that big blue background. (Sometimes it almost seems He’s setting out to, but not in letters I can recognize!)

And now even that horizon pillar has dispersed completely, upward disappeared.

In withdrawing, quiet, with my gentle Shepherd, I sense the familiar, “Peace, be still.” “Be still and know that I am God.” That’s all. And the peace itself seems an answer.

Then I go to church and hear a sermon on the angst of not understanding God’s dealings or direction, the times we can’t see His footprints or road signs anywhere. The example, at the Red Sea, to which God’s leading had always shone so clear: day pillar of cloud, night pillar of fire, taking His people right up to a big dead end Red Sea— unarmed, and with a great approaching menace signaled in a dust cloud from behind! What to do at times like these: “Stand still, and see the deliverance of the LORD.”

Hm.

*****