"Sunday Morning at the Lake" by Jenny Katherine Hart

Honestly, Jesus spent a massive chunk of his life running away to the wilderness just to escape the crowds and the religious leaders of his day. Standing here with the freezing lake water soaking through my boots, I think I finally get it.

Photo by Jack B / Unsplash

The water at Lake Roosevelt doesn’t care about my salvation, which is the exact reason I park my truck by the trees every Sunday morning. Preacher and Ivy always bolt from the cab the second the door clicks open. Preacher is an old hound with a voice that can rattle windows and a habit of wandering off. I named him years before I finally stopped spending my weekends under the buzzing fluorescent lights of church basements. Ivy is younger and way faster, currently tearing through the underbrush after the ghost of a squirrel, leaving Preacher and me to pace the shoreline at our own lazy speed.

There is a heavy, healing kind of quiet out here in Gifford. It fills up all the empty spaces where my anxiety used to live. For the first thirty years of my life, Sundays were incredibly loud. They were full of four-part harmonies, the crinkle of thin Bible pages, and this suffocating expectation that everyone had to be certain about everything. We had answers for every single question, or at least we got really good at faking it. Walking away from that feels like stepping out of a suffocating, packed room straight into a freezing winter wind. You can finally take a full breath, but the chill hits you all at once and you realize just how alone you are. That is the grief no one warns you about. I still miss the harmony of the singing. I miss the chaotic comfort of the potluck casserole dinners. I genuinely miss the naive, sweet feeling of believing I belonged to a special club handpicked by God.

But then I watch Preacher bury his snout into a pile of wet pine needles, completely content with the sermon of damp earth. The lake stretches out ahead of us, massive and totally unbothered, reflecting a gray Washington sky that demands absolutely nothing from me. There is no guilt trip here, no passing of the plate, and no petty gossip disguised as a prayer request. Honestly, Jesus spent a massive chunk of his life running away to the wilderness just to escape the crowds and the religious leaders of his day. Standing here with the freezing lake water soaking through my boots, I think I finally get it.

I whistle for the dogs, and they come charging back, their tails thumping with a pure, simple kind of joy. We aren't out here trying to save the world today, and we aren't trying to lock down a spot in eternity. We are just a person and two dogs walking through the woods, incredibly glad for the sudden burst of sunlight cutting through the overcast sky. It feels like a tiny, beautifully quiet kind of resurrection.