The Hallway

The Hallway

I have been told I am a born Storyteller, and perhaps I am. I know that when I draw close to someone who is hungry to listen, my stories, the stories of my life, pour out of me as easily as water from a gently squeezed sponge. I take great delight in telling my stories, the ups and downs, the triumphs as well as pitfalls, and laugh with the listeners as if I am hearing these stories myself for the very first time. I relive each and every story as I tell it, almost as if it were happening all over again. If this is the gift of the Storyteller, then so be it. I will not fight with it, nor with whom God has made me to be. To do so would be as foolish as the wind telling God to make it still.

Perhaps why my stories live and breathe so close to the surface in my heart, is that I have lived so many lifetimes in one lifetime. I have had many changes, in homes, locations, schools, circles of friends, jobs; then later, countries, and languages, foods and cultures. Worlds. Entire worlds changing.

My life, the longer I live, seems to me like a many chaptered book. The book itself is separated not only by chapters, but indeed by other books.

The delight of growing old is coming to a new chapter in one's life, and remembering a foreshadowing of something that was written in an earlier chapter, pages and pages ago. Years and years ago. Even decades and decades ago. This book is my actual life. What delight, then, to walk into a new chapter, realizing that the Author had set up these new experiences through what He had already written so long before.

If one is a reader, there is no greater delight than this kind of foreshadowing or the tying up of the loose ends from an earlier scene. It brings such a sense of completeness. A whole from what before felt interrupted or disjointed. One always loves when it all makes sense.

When now I peruse the long, meandering and oft times entirely off the path entirely memories of my lifetime, I have a sense of a very large house with many, many rooms. All of these rooms open out to one common hallway; and they are all on one single floor. There are no staircases separating one part of my life from another, as if on one level I was 'higher' and another 'lower'.

The hallway is plain and nondescript. There is no clear color on the walls, and the doorways, though they be many, are equally plain. There is nothing at all going on in this hallway, except for the passage from one door to another. From one life, to another.

Beyond those doors are my worlds. My many, many worlds. Lifetimes I have lived. Paths I have walked. Pools I have swum. Peoples' faces I have both loved and loathed. Friendships so deep and so intimate, I must have been sure at the time that we would walk through every path together, never to be separated.

In my ears are the hum of conversations and the music of laughter that happened lifetimes ago. There is also the sharp sound of anger of raised voices. The slap of a hand; the slam of a door. The sound of jet engines and old, obstinate car engines that refuse to turn. The singing of robins building their nests in the oak trees of Pennsylvania, and the raspy caws of the crows of South India.

And music....distinct and separate...the sound of it can put me in a place and time in the same way that scents and smells do for others. A certain song can literally transport me to another place, another season, another group of friends and family. Another life. Another me.

But, all of these are me. Totally me. Completely me. That is what this Hallway teaches me. I am integrated and connected. I am unified and unique. My life is mine and mine alone. Only I and one Other know what is behind each and every one of these doors. Only I and one Other have had the experience of entering into each separate part.

In that Hallway, I was never alone. One greater Presence is standing alongside me. Towering over me, sometimes His hand gently resting on my shoulder, guiding me to the next door to enter. Always, His is the hand opening those doors. In every experience of the Hallway, I have never once seen my own hand reach out to turn the doorknob. It is always His hand which does this.

This revelation that only He has been with me through every path, in every room, in every lifetime that I have lived, heightens my understanding of one great Truth that has shaped my entire life. Jesus is my best Friend. My oldest, and dearest Friend. The One, the only One who has walked right beside me from the beginning when I took my first breath, let out my first scream of life; was placed in my mother's arms and given the name that has bestowed me even to this day:

Deborah.

Only He was there, smiling with my parents at this firstborn daughter, dark haired and blue eyed. A nose that would soon be covered in freckles not too many years ahead. A voice that would soon change from the cries of an infant demanding to be fed, to one that would be likened to the angels singing.

My oldest and dearest friend. My best friend. Always aware of me, never losing sight of me. I have known His presence a long, long time.

No other intimate friendships and relationships have traveled with me on my entire path. There were seasons that I was separated from childhood friends, who did not reappear until our middle age; our reunions fraught with tears and happy chuckles at the look of each other's faces. Also my beloved cousins, who were such a big part of my childhood, but whom I lost sight of for literally decades... only to be lovingly reunited with a longing so sore, we wondered aloud why we had allowed such separation, and vowed it should never happen again.

My siblings have not been with me in most of the rooms in my Hallway. They have never seen me preach a sermon, nor heard me lead a thousand people in praise to our God and King. They have not seen me kneeling in my room alone, but not alone, praying through the wee hours of the night, pressing into the bosom of my loving God to find my sustenance there.

My mentors, who have seen me, and known my by the Spirit. Who have sacrificed for me and poured out all they had of God into me, so that I could grow and become what God intended for my life. Even they have not been in all the rooms of my life. For they were not there when I giggled giddily with my pals on a hot summer night, stinking of chlorine and Coppertone. They had not seen me weeping wailing in my car on the six hour drive from my parent's home back to mine. Agony and grief cutting my soul like a knife. They were not there. But He was.

My most precious and intimate relationship, that of my husband, my lover and verymy best friend who ever breathed with me the life that I now presently live...only appeared into my life when it was already one third lived. His knowledge of me is deeply enhanced by a wondering desire to know me and all of my secrets. He is jealous with love to see behind me into all of those unopened doors. To know the integrated me. To know the why's of me. His passion for this knowledge nearly undid me when we first married 30 years ago. I was so unused to anyone getting that close. I had walked these paths and hallways alone for so many years, I was quite comfortable in my solitude.

However marriage is not the place for solitude, but rather intimacy. And not just the sexual kind, but rather the intimacy of knowing and being known completely and utterly. Not only being read like a book, but being memorized like a text of scripture. Such longing has both unnerved me and wooed me. I find myself drawn into the love of this man over and over and over again. For he revels in all of who I am, and longs to know all of me, even as my Savior knows me. Such love is beyond my understanding.

I remember once, before marriage, I was in an empty classroom in a cool and chilly Sweden. I bowed my knee at the end of my heavenly assignment and asked, 'What next, Lord?' I had asked this on each and every assignment I had been on over those years. Rather than answer with my next place, I felt, instead, a warm, glowing, loving presence. His presence, drawing near me in that cold classroom, while I knelt on that tile floor. And in His presence, I heard Him say to me, " I love you....I love you...I love you....and I long to love You in yet another way....I will send someone to you...who will love you the way that I love you. I will love you, through him...you will know how completely I love you by how completely he loves you....'

I was shocked. I had neither been seeking for nor or asking the Lord for 'another' partner in my life. I had been so very happy with the lovely relationship that I had been building with Him; learning His ways, hearing His voice. Rising up in my calling and living the life He was writing for me.

I was shocked, but I knew He had said it, and that the matter was settled. No way out, at some point, coming up, I was going to be a married woman. Literally, one year later I was indeed a married woman living with my beloved husband on the northeast coast of Scotland.