The Midwest is full of water right now, the Missouri is swollen and angry and claiming more land than it needs.  The sky and it are on a team, and life is a soggy, drowning mess.  My dad and I tried out a trail that goes through Iowa, through small towns and pasture and along the river.  We loaded the bikes up and wore plastic jackets and mud worthy shoes and we set off.

The problem was, the trail had turned to a sort of wet, sticky clay and so instead of flying through, we struggled.  Wrestling with the ground, fighting to move.  It was fitting, though, because my soul was busy doing the same thing, pushing against the edges of His will.  I was at the peak of my fight, battling it out with Him, when the ground reached up and grabbed me and God reached down and pushed me and I- I went sailing into the mud. 

He does that to me sometimes.  Knocks me off my feet and onto my face.  My dad saw it, he heard the words coming out my mouth and the way my legs were tangled in the frame and he said, Tasha.  It's okay to cry, Tasha.  I looked at him.

Dad, I don't want to cry.  I am angry.  I am so angry.  And I rode the rest of the miles quietly, steadily.  There is something inside of me, my soul.  And it is the strongest reality I feel sometimes.  The wrestling of my soul with The Spirit and that movement speaks to me in a louder way than any recited passage or memorized prayer can.  

I've spent a lot of my life trying to understand peace.  It's the absence of this, the presence of that.  It's a feeling, an action, an attitude.  Recently I've come to understand it in far simpler terms.  The Word talks about passing understanding, about quickening and troubling and stillness.  Peace is in the prodding, in the wrenching.  It's when my soul listens to The Spirit's movement, when it understands without hearing words. 

I think it's wrapped up inside all of those strong words.  Honor, love, endurance, strength.  I think inside each of them, at the heart is peace.  People talk about it like it's some soft, comforting thing.  I think that is wrong, very wrong.  I look at the history of peace and I shudder.  Jesus's bloody prayers, Israel's sacrifices, Job's loss, the angels' presence, the cross.  Peace is a great, terribly raw thing and it is bound together by struggle.

I am clumsy and unsure and hardly steady.  And so, often I have to dangle over the cliff for a while.  I think sometimes He asks us to jump off the cliffs.  I am not surprised when He does.  His wildness is the part of Him I love the most.  It is when He turns me away from a flat, safe, firm place that raises my chin and tenses my body.  I had felt The Spirit pulling me back, I felt Him saying this is not your road to go down.  And I do not understand.

I do not understand His story and right now I would really like to hijack it.  To rip pages out and add some new ones in.  Some clean, neat, logical pages.  At the same time that I have these thoughts, I have something deeper.  I have that simple calm, deeper than my questions and deeper than my childishness.  A calm that is outside of my ability to create. 

I am upset.  I am even angry.  And there is so much peace.