The New Symbol

It is closing in on ten years now since I retired, left what had been mostly an urban life for a long time, and moved to what amounted to a small farm which in some ways was like a baptism that has changed everything about my life.  Even the things I figured to be nailed down beyond being pulled up have been pried lose for another look.   After taking the ordination papers off the wall, I still preached and served in a nearby small membership church for a little over four years, but that came to end leaving me with what was here where the road had brought me. 

While I could imagine some of the ways life would be different after retirement, what I could not have imagined was the way it opened up a new season of spiritual searching.  All my life my understanding of God and my experience of His presence had been connected to the church.  All that changed here.  I realized how completely was the change one day when I was out in the woods trying my hand at calling a turkey.  Every part of me was intent on scraping the box and listening for a distant gobble.  While I was listening for what was out there, an owl landed quietly in a tree behind me.  How long he sat there watching me before filling the air with a loud announcement of his presence, I do not know, but I do know it became a moment which made me literally fall off the bucket on which I was sitting.

It was also the first moment of realizing that the God who I had known mostly as the God of church was the God of creation.  It was a moment of knowing that God was present with me in the new place and in the new season.  I had not been forsaken.  It was also a moment when I came to understand that the owl was a new symbol for the revealing presence of the Holy One in the midst of my new life.  Even now when I hear the hooting of the owl in the darkness, I am reminded that God is always out there somewhere, but never far.