Ransom, my dog, and I walk a familiar path through a Conservation Area.  In the early morning we can count on some privacy, he alone with his curiousity and me with my thoughts.  One day as we walked I could hear someone talking.  I expected to find a kid coaxing frogs out of the pond.  We came around a corner past some trees and Ransom sat.  Without being asked.  There before us was a woman on her knees, face to the ground, murmuring.  Her long skirt covered her lower body, and her sweater covered the rest, including her head.  The sweater was covered in mosquitoes.   I assume she was part of a Mennonite group in our town with their own culture and who mostly keep to themselves.  I urged the dog forward, hoping to quietly walk by her.  Her murmuring had the cadences and tones of a prayer of petition.  A very earnest one.  Of distress.  Ransom got a little closer, decided he wasn’t sure what I was getting him into, and bolted back down the path.

We all react that way some time or another.  Not just because this was an intensely private moment, but because it is an encounter with suffering.  I have many times wanted to bolt.  To avoid sharing someone else’s pain.  Avoid the risk of self-discovery, avoid opening myself to a certain amount of suspension of who I am to develop a greater sense of the One who May Be.  To walk away, at a good clip, from a life of giving to others and helping them make sense out of things.  Who really wants to sit with a sufferer and experience a sense of helplessness?  We don’t always have a lot of choice.  If we are going to interact with each other in an authentic way – as people – we aren’t going to avoid suffering.

I don’t know if the woman in the forest wanted the ground to swallow her up or couldn’t raise her face but her tone and posture made me want to help her.  Maybe that’s what she was asking of God.  Something had to change.

But I didn’t understand her words – she was speaking in what I recognised as Low German – and this was an agonisingly private moment.  I followed Ransom.