calling out your name

Call me Abraham. A crazy old geezer who picked up and went after some mysterious God of the wilderness. Ok, maybe not the old or the geezer part, but definitely the crazy. I’m drawn into his story, as if my star fell out of the sky and landed on the path out of Ur. I’m tagging along, one of the servants carrying the camel-hair blankets or something. I try and listen in on his whispered dealings with the smoking firepot, and I can see the blazing torch hovering in the night. We’re strangers and aliens, following the path between the cut up pieces of meat. It’s a strange path of sacrifice and having angels to high tea. It’s fearful and wonderful, and yes, crazy.

I don’t know how to get where I’m going, but I’ve seen it before. I can’t remember if it was in a dream, or when I was a little girl in Saskatchewan roaming the plains. It’s a hill, a moment of reaching its crest, the thrill of the wind behind me and the sudden opening of the sky above. The grass is long and rustling in the wind, and I think there’s a big rock, the kind you can sit on and pray. Maybe there are stars, billions of them, or it could just be a storm brewing. I’ve got that feeling that something is about to happen and yet I’ve never been more at rest. This is home. I know I’ll recognize it when I see it.

Is it a place of earth or is it on the other side of the door? I think Abraham probably asked the same question.

Rich Mullins wrote a song about the way I feel when I get that longing in my stomach. Here’s the last verse to “Calling Out Your Name”

From the place where morning gathers
You can look sometimes forever ’til you see
What time may never know
What time may never know
How the Lord takes by its corners this old world
And shakes us forward and shakes us free
To run wild with the hope
To run wild with the hope
The hope that this thirst will not last long
That it will soon drown in the song not sung in vain
And I feel the thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And I hear the prairies calling out Your name
And I know this thirst will not last long
That it will soon drown in the song not sung in vain
I feel the thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And with the prairies I am calling out Your name