Frogs talk to each other, they converse in the cattails at the back of the pond. I’m here. I’m over here. Good morning. Back at ya. I allow myself a polite step or two into their bog, their quavering deep notes are a balm to my ears.
I don’t know what the frogs are saying but I assume they’re acknowledging each other and their common, amphibious ways. Having heard their conversations many times now, I believe it would be a glum, despondent frog living alone in a pond without the intimate croaks of others.
I might as well have been dropped into a deep, dark swamp in the early days of my son’s addiction. I prayed, certainly, and I knew God was near, but the isolation from my prior life and everyone in it was bewildering. It was as if my old language and orientation to life had been stripped away. I had nothing to offer to the norm, so blithely moving around me, nor did it have anything to offer me. Thank God, for the love and growth in the rooms of recovery, for it is His blessing upon me and the ones I join, that returns us to the land of the living, healed and restored.
One day my son told me his friend’s parents wanted to talk to me. They too had lost their orientation to life. They too longed to speak and listen to someone who could enter that terrible darkness with the warm light of serenity and understanding. I couldn’t go to them fast enough. As I left they called me an angel. I am not an angel but I know profoundly that compassion is a balm to the soul and sharing it with others is essential to my life in Jesus.
I have much to write to you, but I do not want to use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to visit you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete. 2 John 1:12
Meeting God at the Park 