Piloting Faith: Just Beyond Ourselves

A Word for the Day...

I've chosen to spend time by a lake during these disrupted days. Close to the lake is a national forest and beautiful hiking trails that take you along winding paths lined by majestic oak trees and crossed by charming streams. Every so often as you are walking along, you come to a place where the trail splits. You have a decision to make, or so it seems.

I've become curious about the ways paths present themselves and the ways something within us whispers, "This way; go this way." If you don't know where either path leads, an intuition arises that is often beyond logic or words. In this way, it feels as if the path chooses you at the same moment that you choose it. It's how you know to take that path. It's just beyond yourself.

Poet David Whyte wrote a poem by that name, "Just Beyond Yourself" where he penned these beautiful lines:

Just beyond
yourself.

It’s where
you need
to be.

Half a step
into
self-forgetting
and the rest
restored
by what
you’ll meet.

There is a road
always beckoning.

When you see
the two sides
of it
closing together
at that far horizon
and deep in
the foundations
of your own
heart
at exactly
the same
time,
that’s how
you know
it’s the road
you
have
to follow.

That’s how
you know
it’s where
you
have
to go.

That’s how
you know
you have
to go.

That’s
how you know.

Just beyond
yourself,
it’s
where you
need to be.

A gift of these days of wondering and wandering has been an invitation into the vulnerability of disorientation. So much is deconstructing and reconstructing around us and within us. We are changing; we are growing...just beyond ourselves. Our certitude of who we are and where we are headed is collapsing, as it must, because it's what allows us to drink from a deeper well of who we might become.

Lean in, friend. Just beyond ourselves is where we need to be.

We are in this together,

Rev. Cameron Trimble
Author of 60 Days of Faith: A Devotional

Prayer for the Week

THIS IS MY PRAYER ROOM
(excerpt)

Pray with me, say the words,
ring the bell, we’re almost there.
This part is my favorite,
it’s where god feels the closest.
So ask for mercy, or for help,
or forgiveness, no need to tell.
For my story is your story,
is every body’s story.

- Mícheál Ó’Súilleabháin
from EARLY MUSIC ©2019 Mícheál Ó’Súilleabháin & Many Rivers Press

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