I said: “Let me walk in the fields.”

Outside my French doors a light snow is falling, dusting the decks. The past few days have been gray, the skies leaden with nickel-colored clouds. Yet, I’m struck by the fact that I’m in nature, that I’m living this life. My here and now, despite the gray and gloom, includes red birds, the sounds of wind, dry leaves rustling, a disgruntled squirrel chirping. For so long I was closed off.

I was in Chicago from the age of 23 until I left during the pandemic in 2020 I will be 65 this year. I never planned to be gone from nature that long. Chicago was supposed to be a one-summer commitment, a stop along the way, but at the end of my summer in 1982 I had to ask myself—Where is it I’m trying to get to, where am I going? I didn’t have a ready answer.

I’d just graduated from Ohio University with a degree in secondary education—a career I wasn’t sure I really wanted to pursue. All I knew was this: I loved Jesus and I wanted to do good in the world. That’s how I ended up in Chicago at an inner-city mission were I did simple things like hand out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sort old clothes. One of my various jobs was to pick up day-old donuts and banana boxes of damaged produce. Many of our dinners consisted of random tin cans where the label had come off. Surprise stew.

At the beginning it was hard to adjust—to all the dirt, litter swirling at windy corners in a vortex of wrappers and paper cups, leaf debris, to the sky obscured by tall buildings, to grassless yards, to old mattresses and burning cars in vacant lots. Even the bits of nature poking through had a pallor, the feel of tenement, of a Charles Dickens’ character dying of the damp.

At the mission there were plenty of old books, most likely donated from the discarded libraries of elderly pastors. The group had developed a passion for the novels and works of George MacDonald a Congregationalist minister and writer who helped spur a revival of Christian mythology and fantasy with his fairy stories where the Divine was often portrayed as a land we might be able to discover if we are open enough, if we have eyes to see.

I stumbled upon his poem I Said: "Let Me Walk" which sentimentally described my own conundrum, my own longing for things green, for an unvarnished sky, for everything I’d left behind.

An excerpt:

I said: “Let me walk in the fields.”
He said: “No, walk in the town.”
I said: “There are no flowers there.”
He said: “No flowers, but a crown.

I said: “But the skies are black;
There is nothing but noise and din.”
And He wept as He sent me back—
“There is more,” He said: “There is sin.”

I said: “But the air is thick,
And fogs are veiling the sun.”
He answered: “Yet souls are sick,
And souls in the dark undone!”

I said: “I shall miss the light,
And friends will miss me, they say.”
He answered: “Choose tonight
If I am to miss you or they.”

This poem framed at the time my decision to stay in Chicago. My head and heart said go, but my deep commitment to the poor, a calling tugged at me to stay.

So at the end of my first summer, I acquiesced to stay for the fall, then another year . . . until the years piled up, thirty eight in total, until uncalled.