Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: REED / READ (02/23/23)
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TITLE: Sway and Bend | Previous Challenge Entry
By Laurie Bahlke
03/02/23 -
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Daphne felt the book fall away from her hand. The pages lifted and skipped at the push of the wind. Her eyes, heavy from reading closed their lids, and she drifted off in a dream as the concrete world slipped away.
She saw herself as a child, laughing and twirling in dresses and ribbons of tangerine and yellow; her bare feet leaving a silver set of prints upon a dewy summer lawn. Sunlight caught the dewdrops and diamonds seemed to be reflected all around her. She was dizzy with childhood delight and joy, as her heart skipped a beat when her feet left the ground. Her arms stretched high above her head as she swayed back and forth.
When she was twenty, her childhood dreams fell away, and the dancing stopped. An accident, an injury, a loss. Sensation was gone and movement in her feet and legs was no more. After doctor’s visits and therapies, there was nothing left but to grieve, and to shout, and to let go. Hope had been swept away; its beating heart silenced.
“I’m not going.” She had said defiantly. “There isn’t anything for me there. It’s just a place and God left it a long time ago.” She heard her mother cry at night and watched the light leave her father’s eyes. She had taken her final bow, and nothing could replace the joy she had lost. Dance took her away to places where melody replaced time, where joy and hope seemed intertwined. Dance was a blessing, and she was grateful. And every night, she had told God so. Why then, had He chased away the dance and left her paralyzed in heart and body?
The lark’s singing grew louder as her feet came to rest on the earth once more. The diamonds began to melt into tears as she stared down at her legs. She was no longer a child, as time had shifted as it only can in dreams. Sway and bend, sway, and bend. The reeds moved in unison as her eye caught sight of the man making His way toward her."You are not broken”, He whispered.“ Your gifts are not gone. In your pain and in your despair, I remain. I heard your prayers in thanksgiving and petition. I felt your absence in the midst of your grief but I love you always and I promise, you will not break.”
Daphne opened her eyes, as two small hands tickled her eyelashes. "Mommy, waaaake up.”
“Yes love, I am awake. And what are yooou doing?” Daphne teased.
“Let’s dance mommy.” And with that, Delilah jumped into Daphne’s lap. The tulle of her pink skirt fluttered as Daphne spun her chair around and around. Delilah lifted her arms high into the air and threw back her head, laughing into the wind, and the sky, and the light.
The sleepy world of dreams pulsed through her on most nights, and sometimes they varied. In some of the dreams, she could feel her legs again, life in her muscles. In other dreams, an injury had never occurred and still in others, she was working out how to dance again in a different way. In the morning light, she swept away tears of gratitude for family, and surprise blessings that danced into her life offering her gifts of hope and resilience.
She had in truth questioned her faith, lost it, and then regained it, one fragile piece at a time. She returned to places of worship where God resided, but she also found God in other places—in the sunrise, in song, in peanut butter-coated kisses, in butterflies, and in the reeds along the river bank. In her dreams, some things changed but the one constant was the presence of the reeds, swaying and bending, and the gentle hand of the Master, always leading her home.
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