adam ross beach

From Donald Miller's Book - Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance

Out our passengerside window the blur of green opens and closes with each passing red-dirt road. My mind focuses on life beyond the trees and the hills and this road cutting through them. It is there I imagine a small home surrounded by forest and a man sitting by a fire, reading the pages of a book he has read before and will read again. He is tired and nodding and, though his eye still brush the words, he has long stopped reading. The fading light through the windows and the warmth of the fire soothe him into a sleep from which he will not wake till morning, finding himself still dressed with a book across his lap. Miles from the cabin, in another home, still in the here and now (albeit in my imagination) I see a family at evening supper, perhaps saying grace. And at that table there is a woman who is glad to have her husband home as he has been to such-and-such a place to do business. And that same man is thinking he prefers no other company than that with which he is blessed tonight. Ever nearer, and perhaps in a home just off this interstate, down a dusty driveway weaving through maple and pine that spread March over these rolling hills, there is a young girl at her desk, constructing a letter to the boy who has earned her heart. And just outside my window, 100,000 voices fire through the phone lines that parallel this road, each voice carried swiftly to a listener who trust his response to broad-shouldered poles and sweeping lines marking the miles from home to home and business to business.
It is something sensational to consider that there is, far and close, vague and defined, separate but intertwined, a God who watches all and is not confused, but sets the sun to its course, frames the trees with symmetry and, with like precision, judges each man's heart as quickly as it beats. No poet, in the greatest of his imaginings, could conceive of anything greater than the real; this great plot pitting us against our deaths, this spinning sphere of color and smell giving flesh to the story God is slowly telling Himself; a story growing nearer and nearer to its dramatic conclusion. It does not escape me that I am blessed to be included in this tale of a billion human conflicts and singular resolution.