I might have ignored this prompting save for the markings on that girl’s wrist I grabbed in the water off the Cliffs some two decades ago.
The tattoo on her hand was exactly the same as the design from my dreams and from the rubber stamp I had made when I was a kid. The same one I doodle over and over. Year in and year out.
Because of the drama of that day, we parted in the dark before I remembered to ask her about the origin of her tattoo. I hope I’ll get the chance to do so someday.
I’ve often wondered what happened to that skinny girl with the long braid and why she was out there on the Cliffs in the first place. Right about today, she should be getting a package from me. A couple of weeks ago, I ran across the smashed watch—not something I would normally keep, but it’s the only thing I have to remember that girl by and that very strange day that changed everything in my life. My dear bride, Lindsey, recently encouraged me to look for her; nowadays you can find anyone on Search. She said it would be good for me to ensure that the rescue really happened—memory can be a funny thing.
The still-skinny woman often talks to me in my dreams. I am trying to picture her expression when she sees the watch.... Somehow I have a feeling she’ll be calling this week. Funny, she has a Pakistani name; there must be a story behind that, since the girl I saw in the water clearly wasn’t Asian. But doesn’t every event have a story behind it?
The rescue back at the Cliffs was so cleansing. My growing agitation evaporated that night…and it’s never returned. It’s as if I started seeing with a clear focus for the first time ever, and I knew what I had to do. Where I had to go. Who I had to be.
No more trying to meet everybody’s expectations. No more trying to hide who I really was.
When I returned from rescuing the girl that day, I was a different person. Oma Adri knew. She cocked her head toward me and then listened…as if hearing a distant voice. I’ll never forget her smile—tentative at first, questioning. And then she opened her arms to welcome me in. She repeated, “Josh, you have what it takes.”
We’ve had so much snow this winter. An old-school snowboarder like myself can’t complain about all the fresh powder. I’m just back from a workday as the director of the Gold Mine Snow Resort. Honestly, the owners only pay me for my presence there. I’m basically a celebrity human advertisement and a goodwill ambassador. Business has improved since I started there, and they pay me well.
I’m sitting in my recliner looking around at what passes for a study. The drawing board. The mementos and awards from the longest-running TV show of our generation:
JoshGlobal.
A photo of me in the Himalayas. Me at Mammoth. Me with Bear Grylls in Africa. Me at Teahupoo. Me at Jordy Smith’s retirement. Tony Hawk and Kelly Slater having dinner at our house here. Me dropping in at Pipe. My show was a celebration of all that is
steezy
and
mooi
in action sports. No competition. No scores. Stunning photography. Lots of travel and digging into the hearts of those who, figuratively speaking, can hold on to that weightless cartwheel feeling just for the joy of it.
In my hand is the rubber stamp I had made so many years ago. I push hard onto the semidry red inkpad and print ThornHearts on the paper next to my chair.
Then I’m back at searching for what’s missing—the iron version of the ThornHeart, about the size of a Frisbee, which I forged and crafted in my shop/studio out back. It has to be in the house somewhere! Lindsey says she heard someone in the house last night, but by the time I got up and looked around, brandishing the Ethiopian sword I keep under the bed, there was only the sound of Oma Adri snoring. Nothing else was missing, so it could not have been a burglar. The back door was closed but unlocked. But that’s pretty common in this small town—we don’t lock things much around here. I couldn’t remember if I had locked it or not before going to bed.
We live right on Water Street, the first house after the last business, which is an abandoned phone company building that has been turned into one of the new coffee libraries. We grow our own vegetables and spices in the spacious garden a few blocks away behind the old broken-down stone wall ruins. Our six children sleep in the two big bunkhouses I built out back. A generation ago, people had such small families; glad that’s starting to change.
The old Methodist building where I used to go with my mom is now a combined school, church, and social club. We are there at least a few evenings a week, having a lot of meals together with the other families. Our kids go to school there, and we often join them for the evenings, walking home together afterward before bed.
In a few years, our oldest daughter, Nellie, will finish school and head south of the border for her national service obligation. She gets to choose the country, and she’s loved Costa Rica ever since our family surfing vacations there, and during filming sessions, when she was younger. It’s a direct train ride to Costa Rica from the station in Santa Barbara, and since the energy revolution, train travel has been free all over the Western Hemisphere. A lot of retired couples seem never to get off the trains.
Dad is back in insurance work in Holland. He’s also joined an athletic club, where he volunteers with young people. Letting go of all my grievances against him has allowed me to enjoy him for who he is. Some of my best recent memories are of him traveling with our crew as we filmed
JoshGlobal
on location all over the world. Mom was never into extreme “feral” travel, so she didn’t join us on trips much.
Every time I think about the iron ThornHeart or search in vain for it, the same words come to me:
“Thanks—it’s for Nellie.”
I even promised God I was going to give it to my daughter if I could ever locate it again, but what would a teenage girl do with something like that? No one would steal it—it would be worth very little at a flea market. And how could it be for my great-grandmother Cornelia/Nellie, who has been dead for years?
Something tells me I’m not going to see it again.
I get more and more words that just come to me from somewhere as I get older. I was raised in a time when that seemed to happen to people less often. The Global South has taught us in the less spiritual North how to listen with our spirits.
Last summer, when Gemechis was here from Ethiopia (the one who gifted me with that sword under my bed), he taught for a full week of evenings about how better to listen to the Spirit. The meeting room has hardwood floors and glass Palladian windows that seem to let in more sunlight than there actually is. We sat in a circle on surprisingly comfortable Shaker-style chairs for the teachings. Gemechis did a series on “My Sheep Hear My Voice” and shared his boyhood experiences listening to God in the Mekane Yesus Church in Africa.
After he was done, Lindsey stood up and prayed for openness, and all of us there were flooded with inaudible words that seemed to come from the same Source. We talked about it among ourselves for days.
The moon is out now, and Lindsey is calling from down the hall to take a walk with her in the snow. I close the inkpad and leave our home with her, heading down the alley, our steps crunchy in the snow, to the trail that leads to the abandoned orchard. As we climb through the rubble of the broken-down wall, I am grateful for those little things in life that make all the difference.
My thoughts turn to the chess set that Oma Adri bought for me so long ago. You see, life is a stalemate. At some point, you have to step out of the game into a new way of living. Only by abandoning all attempts to meet others’ expectations can you truly hear the voice of the Spirit and be freed to pursue what God would have you uniquely do.
As I help Lindsey over the last knee-high stone, slippery from the ice, I remember my parents’ story about the day I was born—the day the Berlin Wall fell. I wonder what happened to all the other babies born on that day. We share a lot with people who live in the same exact time period as we do—we experience the same slice of the world’s story. Somehow, within all this, destiny is fixed and freedom is real. Don’t ask me how the two fit together, but they do. And the pivot points in our life story are tiny shifts that lead us to a whole new future.
So tonight as we walk, Lindsey and I laugh together about the missing iron artwork. We reminisce about our travels during the shooting of
JoshGlobal
. We marvel at how bright winter nights can be with a full moon and snow cover. We joke about how bad clothing used to be—how we used to get cold on evenings like this one. Remember how bulky winter wear was a couple of decades ago? My kids love to laugh at pictures of me in my old snowboard gear.
I’m getting a lucid vision, as I look up at the moon through the stark, bare branches of the orchard, of a European churchyard. Organ music is playing. In the center is an old iron gate. Why do I avoid looking at the gate?
Somehow I know that it’s time for something to be “made right.” I squeeze Lindsey’s gloved hand and wipe a little tear from my eye with my other hand.
A word-phrase that Jesus spoke on the cross comes to me in the original Greek:
tetelesthai.
It is finished.
My hand screen vibrates. The text message rotates into place:
Josh & Lindsey: In Ur driveway. U in town?
—Katarina & Saahir
Angelo
2031
Hillegersberg, Holland
C
ome with me again to the Hillegonda Church on the little graveyard mound in Hillegersberg on this sunny day. I have a surprise for you. Have you guessed what it is?
For the second time in this story (and everything is a story), I am going to intervene in the physical world, which overlaps with the world of dreams and the world of visions and truth. Your instincts may want to label me as an angel, but that label carries so much baggage in your world.
I’m not a Precious Moments figurine, and I don’t have wings. A lot of you also believe that people become angels when they die, but angels are angels and people are people. When I appear, people tend to be afraid, which is why we always have to greet them with…well…
Enough of that. To the task at hand!
You can probably guess what I am carrying up the crunchy sounding gravel path to the church. The dinner-plate-sized iron ring is cold in my hands but warm and good at a heart level. I feel its rightness running up my arms. Perhaps Josh will (with quite a shock) discover his artwork here someday. But that’s, as they say, another story.
In fact, have you ever noticed that things just disappear from your possession and you can’t find them? If so, perhaps they are being put to use somewhere by one of us…?
I’m doing this for Nellie.
The cosmic checkbook must be balanced. Cornelia, Nellie, passed on in an elite retirement home in Ommoord many years ago, her hair, as always, neatly combed over her scars. She’s never, for obvious reasons, been back to this place, so I am standing in for her.
We hear an organist, whom we cannot see from here, practicing in the church as we approach the dreaded gate. Bach. “
O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden
”
*
comes wafting into the sunlit graveyard through the wide-open windows, on this unusually warm winter morning just after sunrise.
The generational family blessing has come full circle. Some people in the story worked with us; some ignored us. Sometimes
you
work with us; sometimes
you
ignore us.
But faith and blessing will always find a way to be fruitful and multiply. The faith of Nellie and Walter, imperfect as they were, had a certain power and grace to it that lived on through Adri, Harald, and Janine. And, of course, it flowered again with Josh and Kati. Faith, like water, will always find its way back to its Source. Carry it, and it will carry you. Receive it from others, and pass it on to them.
Until this sunny morning, the blackberry bush where you and I did our hiding back in the 1940s has grown, untrimmed, to the point where it has virtually engulfed the iron grating in its thorny clutches. That is about to change, and you won’t believe your eyes. Just watch.
As I lift the metal ThornHeart chest high in front of me, just yards from the gate, the iron artwork in my hands starts to glow. The glow begins to repel the blackberry branches, and they literally retreat around behind the now-bared, rusty, black-iron gate.
You can hear the rustling and snapping as I approach, step by step, and the gnarled vines shrink away. I notice that a wooden board with barely visible writing on it is lodged in the base of the vine stems: V
ERRADER
(traitor).
As I place the ThornHeart on the gate, it vibrates and glows even brighter, melting onto the iron bars in a weld that will never be broken. I let go, and it cools into its permanent place. Rust from all around me falls as powdered orange dust to the ground from the decades-old gate and fence. A fresh, shiny coat of black paint seeps out from inside the iron itself. It dries instantly in the first light of the sunrise. Incredible, but not surprising, somehow.
Restoration. I scan the base of the blackberry bush for the V
ERRADER
sign. Gone. Way gone. I smile.
It takes a crown of thorns and a truly good heart to destroy the wounding thorns of life.
The organist finishes the Bach piece, as if waiting on me. Organ music always hangs in the air for a couple of seconds after the hands leave the keys. I breathe deeply and let my emotions flow out like the receding tide to the point where I am once again able to speak. I brush some powdered rust off of my black sleeves and take a step back. I stand formally at attention.
I whisper, “For Nellie,” and everything around me shifts back to the way it should be. A cosmic fever seems to break, and we are able to breathe with more ease in this place. Curses are meant to be broken.
If you pay attention with your spirit, you will notice these kind of shifts. They happen all the time. Evil and brokenness are never even any good at being evil and broken. The pharaoh always ends up at the bottom of the Red Sea. The evil dictator must die by suicide. Good is simply good at being good. And prevailing.