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| Molly, one of the other leaders for the retreat, volunteered to set up this prayer station. The plan was to simply collect rocks from the water’s edge and put them in a pile next to the orange-colored folder with instructions tucked inside. “There’s a problem,” Molly said. “The Arkansas has no rocks.” “What?” I said. “See for yourself.” Sure enough. The shoreline produced nothing harder than wood and bone. I threw a stick into the stream. Anxieties that could float just didn’t seem to cut it, especially when they got tangled up with other sticks/anxieties and formed a small beaver dam. OK, I said, so metaphors don’t always work. Not one to give up, I suggested sand. Maybe, I said, our anxieties and worries are too general to be named. We have an overall feeling of stress and so we could throw in a handful of sand to symbolize the—stress. Molly looked at me for a moment like I had just landed on earth from Mars and said, “Let’s go walk in the woods.” I didn’t want to walk in the woods. I had seven more prayer stations to set up and 30 students to keep track of and a screen door that wouldn’t work and besides it was hot and humid and once you get off the beaten path, this place was snake But we went, of course. We were An hour and five spider webs later, we took a bucket of 47 rocks to the river’s edge. “Sometimes,” said Molly, “you have to work a little to identify your worries. You have to dig around a lI picked up a rock and heaved it as far as I could into the river. I looked at Molly and smiled. She was right. Continued... |
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