The Road My Dog Didn't Want to Go Down
On asking for courage even before we know what will be asked of us
It’s a blustery New Year’s Day here in Lancaster, the very razor’s edge of 2025, only a dozen or so hours in the books. One kid is sleeping off an overnight at a friend’s house and another is waiting for the football game to begin and two of the girls went out for breakfast with their grandmother. Maile’s finishing up an Agatha Christie murder mystery. It’s a quiet morning, the calm before the storm of school starting back up (tomorrow) and our little shop reopening (Friday).
We’re both, in a metaphorical way, looking out over the coming year and wondering what this next batch of days might hold. When we started last year we didn’t know we would buy a bookstore and we didn’t know Maile’s dad would pass and we didn’t know a year could be the hardest and the best and the most exciting and the most terrifying year yet.
I somehow get to this point where I think I know all the range of what a year might hold, and then that year smiles and shakes its head and hands me something I never saw coming, which I guess is why we call it life.
I take Winnie on our little 1.5-mile loop and the wind through the trees sounds like a river or a low-flying aircraft and I hear the thunderous crash of a tree coming down in the woods down towards the river and we jog and walk and jog on these little streets in the middle of suburbia. I pass the houses of people we’ve come to know in the neighborhood, the doors we knock on for Halloween: the kind old couple in the English-style cottage and Poppy’s friend’s house and the place with the two huge Great Danes and the guy with the tiny dog and the middle-aged man who never smiles or nods hello. We do our figure-eight through that part of the neighborhood then go back past our house and head south. The sun is shining. The clouds are in a hurry.
Then we come to the road that Winnie sometimes refuses to go down. And she refuses again. She braces her front legs and arches her back in a downward dog and she nearly slips her collar. I give her a tug. I try to encourage her. She takes a few more steps, then veers to the side.
There’s something about this street that Winnie doesn’t like. Maybe she smells a scary dog. Maybe she senses there’s an ax murderer in the house at the end of the cul-de-sac. Maybe she’s just sick of it already and wants to go home.
There’s something about this street that makes Winnie very nervous. Does she know precisely what it is that gives her pause, or is it some general concern, some instinctual misgiving? Most likely it’s some previous experience, some old terror or fear or enemy, that keeps her from going down that road when I ask her to.
I wonder what buried terror keeps me from going down a new road or avoiding a much-needed visit to an old one.
In February of 2024, at the very dawning of the year, I saw something on Instagram that caused me to send Maile a text that would change our lives completely:
Maile’s response always makes me smile—no questions, no hesitations, no wondering about this or that. Just a simple yes. Nothing more than a deep, inexplicable desire finding alignment with an invitation to connect with something new taking place in the world.
It’s eerily reminiscent:
And Mary said,
Yes, I see it all now:
I’m the Lord’s maid, ready to serve.
Let it be with me
just as you say.
There is so much power in opening our eyes.
There is so much power in being willing.
There is so much power in a simple yes.
I think about the new things that will present themselves in 2025, the opportunities and tragedies and homecomings and homesickness. The people who will leave us this year and the new friends we’ll make. The devastations and the celebrations.
Can I learn to say yes to it? To all of it?
Can we find the courage to release old fears, old failures, and step into something new?
Some recent posts over at our Substack page for our book shop, Nooks:
The Artist's Way ? When and what edition? I have an older copy.
Will I open my hands to what the Lord has for me this year, or keep my white-knuckled strangle-hold of control going strong (but ultimately failing)?