One winter morning, when I was in fifth grade, it started to snow.
Not the annoying snow.
Not the wet, gray, this is going to be a nightmare by four o’clock snow.
The good snow.
Big, fat flakes falling slowly enough to make you think the sky had finally decided to stop rushing.
The kind of snow that feels like mercy.
I had just finished breakfast.
Probably cereal. The sugary kind that cut the roof of your mouth but somehow made you feel like you were already winning at life.
I was ten.
My standards were low.
A bowl of cereal and a snow day?
I had basically achieved enlightenment.
I looked out the window and saw the snow sticking.
That mattered.
Snow that sticks changes the world.
It covers the ugly parts. Makes everything quieter. Makes the neighborhood look like somebody finally cleaned up after us.
I grabbed my jacket... probably two sizes too big because back then you didn’t buy clothes for the child you had. You bought clothes for the child you expected to have three years from now.
“Grow into it.”
Apparently that was the parenting philosophy.
I ran outside.
And then I did something I hadn’t planned on doing.
I laid down.
Right in the snow.
Flat on my back.
Snow landing on my face. Cold air slipping down my jacket. Arms stretched out beside me.
I stared straight up.
After a while, the sky stopped looking like the sky.
It became something enormous.
Something I didn’t have a word for yet.
Birds hopped between bare branches. The last leaves gave up and spiraled toward the ground.
I heard almost nothing.
Just my breathing.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
And somewhere between those breaths was this incredible stillness.
I didn’t understand it.
I was ten. I was probably also wondering if there was more cereal.
But I felt something.
Something bigger than me. Something peaceful. Something that didn’t need anything from me.
It didn’t ask me to accomplish anything.
It just seemed to say... I’m here. And somehow, so are you.
I have a name for it now that I didn’t have then.
God.
Forty-five years later, I was walking the dogs through the woods.
It was fall... the kind where the leaves turn impossible gold and everything looks like it’s forgiving you for something.
I had walked that trail a thousand times.
And I was doing what adults do when they’re trying very hard not to be where they actually are.
Thinking.
Solving imaginary problems that hadn’t happened yet.
I had places to be. Things to do.
Then I took a wrong turn.
Except it wasn’t wrong.
It led to a little clearing. Maybe thirty yards of wild grass surrounded by trees.
Something about it stopped me.
I looked at the grass.
Looked at the dogs.
And for reasons I still can’t explain, I laid down.
Just like I had when I was ten.
The dogs looked at me like I had finally lost it.
Then they curled up beside me and sighed... the deep, dramatic sigh dogs make when they’ve been carrying the emotional burden of the entire family.
The clouds moved overhead.
Birds crossed the sky.
The trees barely moved.
My body was older now. My knees had opinions. My back had a grievance department.
But the stillness? The stillness hadn’t aged at all. It was exactly where I’d left it.
Waiting. And lying there, I realized something that hurt.
I had spent most of my adult life standing.
Trying to become successful enough.Good enough. Trying to control things that had never agreed to be controlled.
I had spent decades trying to hold up the world. And there I was, lying in a field, realizing the world had been holding me the whole time.
That fifth grader knew something I had spent forty-five years forgetting.
He knew how to lay down.
I had to become an adult to forget how.
Maybe that’s what happens to us.
We get up.
And then we spend our lives getting up again.
We start believing that if we stop moving, everything might fall apart.
As if God had somehow appointed us regional manager of the universe.
I wonder how many times He whispered, Lay down.
And I answered, Can’t. I’m busy.
Busy becoming someone.Busy proving something.
Then, after forty-five years, I laid down again.
And nothing happened.
Which was everything.
Just grass.
Dogs.
Trees.
Breathing.
Stillness.
And God.
Exactly as He had been when I was ten.
Waiting without impatience. Loving without requiring proof. Present without demanding my attention.
And I finally understood...
God wasn’t asking me to carry more. He was asking me to put something down.
The need to control what cannot be controlled. The exhausting belief that my worth is hiding somewhere inside the next accomplishment.
Maybe grace has been there all along, underneath all that noise.
Because the lesson wasn’t that God found me again.
He never lost me. I was the one who kept getting up.
So maybe growing older isn’t about learning how to carry more.
Maybe it’s about remembering how to lay some of it down.
On snow.
On grass.
On the unsteady ground of this strange, beautiful, ordinary life.
And remembering what a ten-year-old boy somehow already knew:
I don’t have to hold the world up.
I never did. I was being held.
“Be still, and know that I am God.”
- Psalm 46:10
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