On "Uprootings" and the Like

I don't do well with heights--or really with any copious degree of space around me. I get dizzy. I might pass out if I stand around it long enough. Even staring up at the sky, lying flat on my back, stirs me to feel although the laws of gravity will suddenly rebel, and I will fall upwards into the vast blue gap. It's entirely unlikely, I know. But it is still a very disturbing feeling to have. No matter how much I try to talk sense into my head about it, my breathing still quickens, my heart still races. I feel as though I could, even if I can't.

I may never fall into the sky in the literal sense, but metaphorical "uprootings" are the stuff of non-fiction. Can you hold the picture in your head--the one of the arrested carrot caught in the farmer's grasp, its hairy tendrils grasping what it can of its familiar surroundings, its green locks drooping like the ears of a captured puppy? It flies towards the sky before it hangs suspended above the earth and is transported away for other uses. No farm-grown vegetable is given the luxury of being a homebody. It's a part of the vocation.

I've spent most of my life steeped in the soil of Education. The earth's composition around me changed as I grew father down, but my movement was always in the same direction. I could still navigate the terrain below. And then--then there is the tug. The upward jolt. The slipping up.  I have been ripened. I have been readied.

I've dreamed about making journeys to foreign lands. I've swooned at a myriad of possibilities to fill in the blank of the "When I grow up I want to be a _____" statement. I remember, when I was around eleven, deciding that I should be a writer, so that I could just write about all of the adventures I imagined about. My thoughts are very well-traveled--my mind has circled the entire sphere. My body, however, has conformed to the rhythms of the underground world. My imagination could scale the seven wonders, but my body loves the habits of Home.

And yet, even within the same neighborhood, there is the upheaval of seasons. We cannot escape the hands of the Farmer. No matter if you are dressed from head to toe in knits and wool, Summer will not wait till you are tired of Jingle Bells to call you out of hibernation. The time is now.

I faced the panic of space recently. No soil to hold me in place, no place to steady myself. Or, at least--that is what I felt. I felt I could fall, I would fall--and it would be a bitter end. But that is when the Gardener spoke to me of the better Ground that holds me up, the better ground from which I cannot fall. That the soil I sought was as sand, without traction, supplying the feel of security without the strength to keep me secure. "There are things that you think you need that you do not need," I felt He said, and I shifted my weight upon the Rock.


On Christ the solid rock I stand,
All other ground is sinking sand
All other ground is sinking sand