I want you to imagine a dirt road.
A red dirt road.
Now i want you to imagine that road full of divots – so that it looks like the ocean frozen in an undulating moment.
Except this ocean has deep tire tracks in some parts where you know a puddle has been, and will be again, and where a vehicle of some sort has left its marks of being stuck at some point.
Now i want you to put some gravel on parts of the road…like a truck full of gravel was on it and has dropped some as it drove (lurched) down the dirt road.
Now i want you to imagine being in a kind of wood kart with a square umbrella-like roof, pulled by a motorcycle.
For an hour.
Just imagine this for the next hour.
Imagine during this hour that you are passing marshes and fields on both sides. The road slopes down away from the thin undulating dirt road to meet the marshes or fields 12 to 20 feet below.
And every 20 minutes you pass a cluster of houses on stilt like legs. Some you arent sure are still livable houses because they lean so far to one side…although to say houses rather than shacks may be a mis-definition.
They are made with poles, or slats of mismatch wood, or cardboard, or random materials. Some are patchwork coragated metal pieces. Some are just roofs and a platform – with a hamock hanging limply waiting for its occupant to return from all day in the fields, or from fishing for snakes in the swamp…..
…
Imagine after spending a few hours playing with lovely lovely village children you head home because the sun is setting quickly, and as you start to reach the end of the country roads you start to see them.
Imagine farmers weary from the day. – the days. the weeks. the months. the years.
They are sitting outside houses, on their motorbikes, and beautiful girls are climbing onto the back of their bike.
Long black hair falling past their hips, brushed straight, not one hair out of place, – perfectly clean clothes over freshly washed bodies. Long eyelashes fall slowly over round soft cheekbones, and rise again revealing veiled eyes over a quick smile. Impecible makeup. Earings dangling over soon to be bare shoulders.
The mens gaze reveals nothing as we speed by on the road.
The darkness swallows them up behind us.
Imagine you have just seen this.
You can do nothing. But you know what has just happened. And your worlds brokenness starts breaking your world again.
…
I am seeing this.
I passed it, in the falling darkness, and i wondered. I wondered about our brokenness as humans.
To these men, this moment is a long days final satisfaction.
The day may have been just that day. Or it may have been a week of days, a month of days, a year of days.
I have no idea.
Even this selfish, – even immoral satisfaction is still sweet in their mouths. Sustaining them till yet again they go back to be satisfied.
Is this real satisfaction?
And my own soul says no. But if it is not, and there is something so much better that we have been robbed of by our desire to do our own thing and go our own way, then…is what we taste in fact really our world in its dead state?
Is what we experience death?
And if so, how would our senses explode in life?
If all we experience, (still sustained by the words spoken that created them,) is still so wonderful to us dead, then how can we possibly imagine how fantastically mind blowingly amazing all would be without sin?!
…
And this makes the tears come. The thoughts of all we have lost, and all we stoop so low to eek out of the world we have, and for all that the Creator truly meant for us to enjoy; still so enjoyable yet so very far from what He intended.
i taste death, and it is deep sorrow.
