To Race Onward

To Race Onward

By John W. Vander Velden

 

It was cool yesterday when I pulled down my bicycle and took it out. Most mornings, if I decide the weather’s fit, I take a short ride. The stretch of our road that remains paved is not long, just from one crossroad to the next. I don’t like driving on gravely ways, if I can help it, so it’s just to the cross road and back.

Our road is quite narrow, so I wait until the neighbors have gone to their employment and the school bus has passed, so I have the road for myself. Yes, that makes it safer and I prefer it that way.

It gives me time to focus.

But it was cool yesterday and I began to consider the wildflowers along my way. The tiny daisy like flowers were covered with new buds, a day or more away from bursting into a fresh bloom. You see they and other plants knew that the season was about to change and seemed to be racing onward...to finish this summer’s task.

The length of the days had begun shrinking in June, but now as we pass mid-September minutes of daylight disappear from each day. I miss the swallows that abandoned the farm late August. They knew as well, racing on their wings to warmer places of longer days, even while summer’s heat raged on.

These things remind me that we too, those perceptive to notice, are racing onward. We rush, forward we hope, aware that time, be it daylight or broader, the allotted time of our own days, is not infinite. There are things to do! Important things! Or so we think, and time runs shorter with each sun rise.

I feel that way myself these days. I see ALL the projects I WANT to complete. Birthdays remind, this stack of weary and aching bones that my calendar does not stretch to infinity and beyond. Well it does actually, of that I am confident, God will care for me one day, but my time on the green side of the sod is another matter. It is that quantity of time that concerns me often as I race forward.

And that is how it often feels. When I set my lifelong task of farming aside, I recognized that the NEW challenges, I picked up in its wake, would keep me hopping. And that is good. But I KNOW the list of stories in my head will likely exceed the time God has set aside for my work upon them.

Oh how that once drove me crazy...this feeling that no matter how hard I raced onward I would not...

You get my meaning. But with the completion of Elizabeth’s Journey my second novel I felt I had completed something important. At least important to me, and I hope it was important to you as well. Though I’m not proud enough to think so, perhaps it was even important to God.

Now I have a new mindset, I take on this new writing challenge, House on the Lake’s Shore, The title is tentative folks, and pray each day that I am allowed to finish THIS project. And when it is finished I will begin in earnest on the next. I’ll not, or try not to in any case, concern myself with all the stories waiting in the green room for their own opportunity to slip out of my cranium and onto the page.

So I will race onward in short sprints, even though each feels like it is marathon in length, and not worry about the next track event.

For it will be enough and I thank my God for the opportunity and the time He has given and the stories He has provided. (629 Words) 9-19-2020