The Meaning of the Backwoods to Me

My “church” these days are the backwoods. Out there in God’s wilderness… far away from everyone else. It’s where I can hear Him speak to me, alone, when there’s nothing else around me.

I hear Him in the stillness. I hear His voice in the stream as it rolls over the rocks in the river. I hear Him in the wind that blows through the tree tops. I see Him in the changing colors of the seasons, from green to red, orange, and yellow. I hear him in the slow popping camp fire at night crackling over the logs as they burn. Where the silence of the snow covers the landscape.

The VA wants to give us a pill to make us “normal”. We sometimes drown ourselves in the bottom of a whiskey glass. Society tells us we are broken and somehow don’t belong in polite society anymore. They’re right. We don’t belong. Our ways of thinking have been forever changed to something else. To see things others rarely see.

But out there ? That’s where I belong. That’s where I hear what God whispers things into my ears. Out there is where I belong. That’s my “church”. That’s the place I am pulled towards. For me — that’s where God is. In the quiet places He made.