It looms large in my peripheral vision, the word and its connotations. the mile count that racks up when I think about the time zones I need to transcend to be with, to be present, to love. I hear it wash softly over me when the words, I'm leaving enter the conversation and the finality of the distance creeps into my heart.
I remember England and the distance between me and that Hilary - her hair mussed by wind and English damp rain, her feet in rainboots and tramping their way through fields, believing in the power of that air to breathe God's love into her.
Distance promises challenge, a knuckle-to-knuckle fistfight of me with time and space, those limitations I want to overcome like a superhero in a cape. I want a big house in the country, maybe a farm bursting with the people I love just in one place together so we can live in the same air and drink the same life-giving water and sing the same psalms of praise in the morning and evening and teach each other the language of faces and hands and sighs and hearts and the million small things you have to feel and taste and touch and see in others.
I want that. Distance looks at me and dares me to believe it is yet possible. That yet a sunrise, yet a love beyond those limits, beyond the horizon lines I can see, beyond the practical. That yet, there is a glorious love that flows from us in grace waterfalls across Rocky Mountains and the Mason-Dixon and the Atlantic Ocean and between the states and the years.
Love,
Hilary
