This post was written by George Dibble, a BYU Humanities Center student fellow.
How long has it been, Lord? Your voice is so quiet.
Alone in a park, in cold and night, I looked. Searched by wandering, stumbling, warming my hand with the other. Closed eyes as I leaned against a tree near a vast, unkempt garden. The past consuming all. The only noise in the January darkness the buzz of a black phone-pole treed between thick branches. In its almost silent lull, I heard God in the hum.
I thought of my mission.
In a trailer on the Navajo Nation, the static whir of lights as if mosquitos bred in the bulbs; I knelt on the linoleum floor with my knees lodged between a bathtub and cupboard. Hands folded. There were people outside talking but it didn’t matter. I was the only one there. In this file-cabinet sized bathroom in a trailer on the Navajo Nation. I was the only one.
I’d been on my mission for about a year and some months at this point. I had two fine companions and all of us quarantined for a COVID-19 exposure. This was my ninth or tenth two-week isolation. I’d spent so much of my mission indoors, losing sight of why I was there, what I was doing, what came next. Each quarantine in internet-less areas, I was forced to stop teaching. To drop everyone we’d been in contact with and to hope to see them again, for their interest to have remained. But it rarely did.
This soon affected my scripture study. What was the point if I couldn’t teach from them? Reading for myself held the same futility. These were words completely disconnected from me—and nothing ever changed. I was still in the tumbleweeds and Arizona red dust. Nothing ever changed. On phone calls home I’d find my family doing something: cross-country roadtrips, cooking marathons, TV marathons. Anything.
I wanted.
One day—the sun clouded in a yellow smog and the horizon line unfindable in dirt-haze—I called Dad. Told him I wanted to go home. He asked why. “I’m wasting my time,” I said. Again, he asked why. Told him I’d rather do nothing but at home. Talking on the floor, I said I’d lost my purpose. Staring at the ceiling as the never-washed trailer windows crusted light like stained glass.
Dad said: “George, you want to teach someone about Christ’s Atonement? Well, for that you need someone to teach. And you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, alone. So, George. Fix it. Fix your purpose.”
Okay.
Okay, Dad.
“You need to pray,” he said. “You need to work hard and pray and with God find a new purpose that you can do on your own. So you don’t feel like a waste. You’re doing good. Stay strong, there.”
Okay, Dad.
Okay.
In the coffin-like bathroom, I knelt. Knelt by the tub and prayed; waited. Silent in a silent world, my prayer could not pierce the veil. Despair is the loss of belief. I had to continue speaking. “God,” my stomach lurched. “God, I know that You are there. Somewhere. So why am I alone. I have suffered, and am so tired. Tired of having to search. Why are You not here.”
In the silence that was everything—the past as my past was then and a denied future as my future was tied to then—I continued waiting. There was the light hum, but its constant buzz washed itself into setting, as if more place than sound.
Then, in this, came response. A feeling that pulled me outside myself without words but in a language I understood, a message not in hearing, but sign, I saw myself, the sacred, the sinful, and all my life placed on a table as if an artifact to analyze. I observed as feelings of inadequacy and guilt poured from myself, evaporating into the room’s nothingness. And so did joy, fulfillment. Here was my life, devoid of God, estranged into obscurity. Only emptiness remained: alone in a cramped bathroom on the floor in prayer. Only God could tell me I lived.
Is it—wait, listen. Look—
look,
it is.
Swaddled.
The Lord.
I remembered how the sun had played around me before, when it seemed like I was moving not toward a destination but a time when I’d known comfort as a child knows safety: given without request. Walking in the desert I’d waved my hand above my chest, stretching shapes across the ground, only to be reminded of life’s fleeting nature as I’d watched the shadows enveloped by the sage, the sand, the approaching clouds.
With that cold, bathroom-floored image of myself I knew that to accept Christ was to descend into the world of duality. To know that He is alive in scripture, in prayer, and in their absence; in all that I’ve both run from and run toward. The sadness; the joy. How all that is me has always been in Him.
In Catholic school I was taught new forms of prayer. One of an artist: how they would begin their creation with a prayer, and when their artwork was finished, the artist would end their prayer. That creation would become the artist’s supplication between the seen and the unseen. Another prayer was of nature: how a person would go out to where time was measured by the color of leaves and begin a prayer. And as they walked, and rested, and watched, all their thoughts would be toward divine supplication. When the person left the outdoors, they ended their prayer.
My teacher explained these as she moved from each end of the blackboard—her navy dress rippling in the shutter-windowed light. Her face always so still. She would never wince, or twitch, or anything betraying her controlled peace. For her, discipleship was order. “God does not dwell in unclean places,” I’d heard. If everything is filed, orderly, then surely God could be there, too. Her steps tapped the wood floors as if knocking on a door, waiting to be let in.
The night-horn bellows shaken leaves into the
construction site. These Lazarus leaves. Gravel
dug from the ground; piled; awaiting burial; the inevitable
close.
I’ve walked for so long, and, Lord, have You been here this whole time? I watch the trees, how they slumber against the wind. I hear the chickadees sing hymns to You who I cannot find. They know what I do not. But I am trying. Here. Let my thoughts belong to You.
How long have I huddled from Your gaze? In my longing, I sense that love endures beyond my understanding.
Love is real. It lives in the unseen. It exists in the silence. Creation, formed from absence. In the beginning when vacuumed space reigned and its body, pierced for stars and planets to fill its vacant home, where was I? And this, kneeling, praying—where am I now in relation to Your works?
Here, in the state which Christ has already overcome, let me move as You would have me.
Some days I see shades of the everlasting while walking: in horizoned, iced clouds and in wind-blown grass flushing as if speaking. And in the dark, alone, when I cannot see the old roads I’ll return to again, and again. I slow my thoughts; close my eyes.—Quiet.
I pass adults arguing and children playing and hear music practiced from a hidden window. I see dilapidated homes folding in on themselves with age; testaments to what has been, and those within them to what will be. Cats hide in bushes; the oleanders only starting to bloom.
I have learned that God speaks in a language not immediately understood. But once felt: the fountain of light and all its then-illuminated night. Above and below, all cared for, balanced in Him.
Overheard yells are privately cushioned. Flowers in sidewalk cracks—and these were not planned, and these should not be here—have been seeded, and persist. How many ask for their trials?
In strength, in weakness, in all that is and is not—there, there is God.
You have come
as the blind described your face and
the deaf drummed your sound;
grasshoppers lean on broadleaf, weighing
moonshadow against their eye.
You stand near the door. Honey-seeking,
gold-banded. The night turns slowly.
On one of these walks, I passed by a little girl in front of an oak-doored church. Dressed in white, standing against the entrance. Her parents took her pictures. They smiled; made faces. They laughed; posed. They moved her to a different backdrop as the girl walked under bug-bitten leaves and sprouting branches, where all began and ended; the girl smiled for another picture in the light breaking through darkness; in our shared humanity.
The world not over for her—and perhaps, me either.
