Recently I had a celebratory book signing and read a portion of my new book, A Day’s Journey. Part of the last chapter gave a good overview of the book; so I decided to share that here as well.
This story is an ordinary one. My dwindling days and diminishing strength are nothing special, since we are all terminal. So given that our days run swiftly toward nightfall, how do we spend them well? I have no easy answer, and I struggle with that question even as I make little plans for next week and bigger plans for next year, aware of how cancer has loosened my grip on my calendar and stripped away any illusion that I am in control of it. I’ve learned, though, that there’s something really good about getting a proper impression of my own smallness. I’ve experienced this in nature while standing in a forest of sequoias, when caught in a storm at sea, and as I’ve sat beneath the moon and stars while the sun burned off the edge of night. There’s wonder in facing such immensities. I like the way the intrepid traveler Freya Stark described waiting for dawn in a faraway place: “It was still far from daylight. The high dome of heaven was revolving with peacock colors and secret constellations among the outlined rocks. . . . I sat there for over an hour, watching the moonlight retreat from the rocky bastions, a process of infinite majesty and peace.”[1] In awe of her smallness before such magnificence, she was, quoting an ancient poet, “like dust in the lion’s paw.”[2]
It is a powerful image, for I, too, am dust, yet caught up in greater things. There are days that the fearful immensity of death looms all around me with its terrible silence and then strikes me with sorrow over this tearing of life and the pain it will leave in its wake to those I love. Yet my going to God is the glorious immensity that makes all the world’s immensities of small account. And because of the resurrection, Jesus has made even the immensity of death little more than dust in the Lion’s paw.
[1] Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins, quoted in Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 237.
[2] Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins, quoted in Theroux, The Tao of Travel, 237.
If you are interested, you can purchase a copy at the publisher's website or from Frontline Missions or at most online retailers.