The Third Path (Weeks One & Two)

Finding Intimacy with God on the Path of Questioning
(C) Eva Marie Everson

Author’s Note: The Third Path was published a few years ago by Bold Vision Books. When they closed, I received the rights to my work back. I have been asked by so many to republish, but I thought it may be best to “publish” at my website so that anyone and everyone could read the word and I could include some of my photography. I encourage your comments and your sharing.

This is Week One.

Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.
Isaiah 2:3

O Lord,
you know me.
You know when I sit
and when I stand.
You have me always present
in your mind.
For this, Lord, I thank you.
You know the path for my life
and what is best for me.
Lord, reveal to me the path
I am to walk. Bless me and guide me
and be Lord to me
so that whichever road I take
I may do all for your glory.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
~“Vocation Prayer” from the Beech Grove
Benedictine Community

Section I
The Real Beginning
This is what the Lord says: “Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk
in it, and you will find rest for your souls.”
Jeremiah 6:16

The sun rose full mast over the verdant hills of Galilee, casting harsh light along the sand-colored plains and lifting the hue of an already brilliant blue sky to a more vibrant sapphire. We had left Nazareth only a short while earlier—we six journalists, one Israel Ministry of Tourism representative, and one tour guide named Miriam—to head into the ancient ruins of Zippori, known also as Sepphoris. I wiped June-inspired sweat from the line of my brow as Miriam spoke words she’d repeated for twenty-five years or more,
encouraging those who heard her to find the spiritual connection in the land where Jesus grew up. Where He lived with His family, played with His siblings. The towns where He worked. The country where He strapped on leather sandals to begin a three-and-a-half-year journey, telling all within earshot that the God of their forefathers loved them still … loved them more, in fact … and wanted them to
return to a deeper relationship than mere religion could offer.

The earth beneath my sandals crunched in welcome as I stepped into the vastness of a Roman theater, once proud and boasting stone seats for 4,500. I closed my eyes as Miriam continued, hoping I could
hear them … those who sat and watched actors perform their craft. At times these spectators were as silent as the stone around them, but then, at an act’s end, they cheered as eloquently as the birds, whose
songs now rose on a wave of dry heat around me.

Remnants of carved columns lay among the dust, displayed but no longer useful for holding up much but the heavy air. “We have every reason to believe,” Miriam told us, “that as tektons—or stone masons—Jesus and his father Joseph would have been among the craftsmen who helped rebuild Zippori during the first century of our common era.”

In His day—most especially during His youth—one of the largest restoration projects in Israel’s history took place in Zippori. We gaped in wonder, wetting dry lips with tongues thirsty for water. Jesus and Joseph, who lived and worked less than five miles southeast of the large, Roman-influenced city, could have—probably would have—been among the number of laborers, Miriam told us.

I gazed over my shoulder, hoping for a glimpse of the young Messiah walking alongside His father, tools and small sacks of food to sustain them for the day carried in hands roughened by their trade. Robes billowing in the light breeze of their steps. Their faces turned toward each other; their smiles broad enough to show pearl-white teeth against Mediterranean-bronzed skin.

I reached out to touch the rough and faded carving that remained along the curve of one column and decided that, yes, He could have placed His hand there too. He could have pushed the chisel into the stone and tapped …

We kept moving.

We saw the Mona Lisa of the Galilee, felt a gentle breeze as we moved along the tree-lined city limits, which welcomed us back to where our journey into this fragment of history began. I noticed them then, the places where men sat and discussed the things of God. Similar in shape to the amphitheater, arranged like a horseshoe, those seats of debate.

“Questions, questions, questions,” Miriam would later say to me. “When it comes to the things of God, hafokh ba v’hafokh ba. Turn it over and turn it over. A gardening term, but it fits here as well.”

And so I have. In some ways, since that day in Zippori, I have turned it over … and turned it over until the soil of my spirit, the rich earth of who I am, is ready for the harvest.

“How does God reveal the heart of man to man?” I wonder.

Questions.

“The Orthodox believe,” Miriam went on to teach me, “that God dwells in every one of the questions He asks.”

But what answers does God not have that led Him to ask these questions? None, of course. He does not ask so He can know the answers, but so the answers are revealed to us … by us and through the provoking and prodding of His Spirit.

But why should He feel the need to lend us His questions so we understand ourselves and, in turn, Him better? What is He trying to explain to us by the power of our words back to Him?

I wonder …

Five years after my first visit, I returned to Israel, this time alone. Miriam waited for me just beyond the gates of the modern and polished Ben Gurion Airport where she greeted me with a tight hug and a smile as wide as I’d once imagined Jesus’ to be. Then she whisked me away for nearly two weeks spent with the two of us walking and climbing, driving and riding the land of the Bible.

And for nearly two weeks, in every public place, I listened intently as men and women gathered in circles of discussion, debating the things of God while His Spirit hovered and dipped and dove and danced among the questions raised to Him. Sometimes in reverence.

Sometimes in fury. Sometimes in fear.
But always, it seemed, with an open heart. An open mind.
Open eyes. Open ears.
May we do nothing less.

The Discovery
I attend roughly ten Christian writers conferences a year. That’s a lot of time away from the comforts and love of my home. But teaching new writers, watching them come into their own, is a passion I cannot let go.

There is also the camaraderie that takes place at writers conferences; we understand each other, we fellow pen-wielders. We speak words and phrases that don’t earn sideways glances of concern. Those of us who hear voices no one else hears and create stories or situations that demand to go from our thoughts to pages of glaring white paper understand one another as no one else can. Our spouses look at us quizzically. Our children are proud, but do not get it (unless they inherited the gene). Our neighbors find it odd that we don’t come out of our houses for days on end except maybe to get the mail (and even that is done in a hurry) … and we’re fine with that. We live in another world. We simply do.

For the Christian writer, there is another level to our creativity to consider. We are more than merely embedded in words and ideas; we believe—no, we know—we have a higher calling, a calling that
requires us to take our craft more seriously. When we attend Christian writers conferences, we expect more than workshops on craft and the industry. We desire more than networking with our “people.” We
also come to these venues to raise our hands in praise and worship, to sit in clusters where we will bow our heads and pray for one another, to slip into quiet alcoves and stare at the green-blue of rolling hills,
or to sit along the banks of large bodies of water—ponds or lakes or oceans—and watch the sun cast diamond glints along the blue-black of the waves as we draw closer to the heart of God by the power
of His Holy Spirit. And when we leave—exhausted and on brain overload—we thank the Lord we could afford such an experience, even though it cost us financially and in time.

We crave these days like dying men and women in need of a single drop of water or the tiniest bread crumb for sustenance. Even those of us on faculty who pour out of ourselves until we feel there is nearly nothing left to give—who fly into conferences skimming our workshop notes and who fly out with grand illusions of catching a few z’s on the plane—come away with a sense of awe at God’s presence and of the joy we feel for simply having been there. But I’ll be honest. I also feel a little let down at the end of a
conference. The spaces between arrival and departure are, for me, tiny glimpses of heaven. And then I am forced back to the real world.

Such was my trip to a small writers retreat—their maiden voyage—held in the backwoods of southern Alabama, not too far north of the Florida border. I drove nearly eight hours to get there, down the long stretch of nothing that is I-10W and then into the thick foliage-lined two-lanes leading from one small Alabama town to the next. “If you need anything, but you don’t stop in Crestview,” I was told, “you’re out of luck. Because after that there’s nothing.”

This much was true. I wove through straight, then winding two-lanes until I finally drove under the rustic sign that declared I’d arrived at Blue Lake Camp. Within a half hour, I’d found the registration office, checked in, and dragged my luggage into the simple but clean room I’d call home for the next few days.
Allow me to clarify—the room was comfortable, but there was nothing special about these digs. Concrete block walls. A wide window overlooking tall pines and thick, flowering bushes … and a parking lot. A double bed in the center of the room. A single bed pushed against one wall. A small desk, an open-door closet, a tidy dorm-style bathroom with peeling wallpaper, and a bedside table with an 8.5×11 folded piece of paper lying angled upon it. A piece of paper I would ignore for the duration of the conference.
I unpacked and headed out to the first of several appointments . . .

---

There is a moment—a speck of time when, later, one can look back and say, “That was it. That was the instant when everything changed.” Sometimes these moments are easily recognized. A car accident. A birth. A death. A wedding. Other times, not so much. I was about to head into one of the latter, and I didn’t have so much as a clue.

The last day of the conference included breakfast followed by morning classes and then a final keynote address presented to give conferees the inspiration they’d need once they arrived back at their respective homes. I had a long drive ahead of me, so I skipped the session, went upstairs to my room, finished packing, and rolled my luggage toward the door. With a final look over my shoulder to make certain I’d not left anything behind (which I’m notorious for), I spied the folded paper on the table.

Pick it up.

The voice wasn’t audible, but it was real. Still, I paused.

Pick it up. Take it home.

I propped the door open with the suitcase, returned to the table, swept up the paper, stuffed it into my red-leather purse, then walked out the door, rolling my luggage behind me.

The return trip turned out to be a lulu. Thick traffic. My GPS took me on the road less traveled (I haven’t forgiven it for that yet). Rain brought darkness, and at one point I thought Orlando had moved to Miami. When I finally arrived home, I dropped the luggage on the bedroom floor, dumped my teaching files and purse on my desk, and—shower taken—fell into bed.

Days passed before I looked at the paper. Unfolding it, I saw it advertised the prayer labyrinth on the Blue Lake grounds—something I’d apparently missed. I read a brief explanation of the concept of the
labyrinth, including light details on the individual paths and how to prepare oneself for the prayer process.

I’d heard of prayer labyrinths previously, but never truly paid attention. Now, though, something stirred. Something I couldn’t quite understand … not yet anyway.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls, the psalmist wrote. I’d felt the fullness of this verse when I stood at the base of the upper waterfall in Ein Gedi, Israel. The water spilled from the rocky crags high overhead and pounded into a pool at the base near my feet. A thousand soldiers marching to war, I wrote in my journal as I sat nearby and felt the spray dance upon and tickle my skin, the Lord’s Spirit stirring my own. That same feeling washed over me again as I stared at the paper.

I wanted to know more. No. I needed to know more. Discovery demanded my attention as it always had when I came across that which I know little to nothing about. What, who, where, why, and how are the opening words to questions that have enticed me my whole life. This was no exception.

The History of the Labyrinth
For days I plunged into the world of the prayer labyrinth—what it was, what it wasn’t, its history. I searched the internet for YouTube videos of labyrinths around the world—from the simplest to the most
ornate. I watched in dizzy splendor and sometimes frustration as self-proclaimed videographers walked the paths, their breathing heavy, their words labored. Hush, I wanted to say. Let me experience this
without your comments (or without hearing breathing that sounded like a coronary was about to ensue). I wished for pretty background music. Something like Paul Cardell’s Gracie’s Theme. Or simple
silence.

I grew agitated rather than centered, the latter which—I assumed—was the point. Finding silence is something I yearn for and yet so rarely discover. My mother sought silence; she despised noise. Every afternoon during the earliest days of my childhood, she sent my brother and me to our beds with one of the books we’d recently checked out at the library. She didn’t care if we napped, she said. She didn’t care if we read. But we would stay in our beds and be quiet for at least an hour.

Although I cannot say for sure, I suspect Mother then escaped to the front of the house where she enjoyed a cup of coffee and the slick pages of one of the magazines she subscribed to—Redbook, Good
Housekeeping, McCall’s …

Anything for sixty minutes of silence.

I didn’t fully embrace or understand the concept until in my forties. Shortly after reading Robert Benson’s book Living Prayer, I gifted a copy to a pastor at my church, who asked the author (who has since become a dear friend) to conduct a silent retreat for our leadership, myself included. Robert agreed. I’d never taken part in a silent retreat. Retreats I’d taken part in had required sharing and singing and talking and laughing. I honestly wasn’t sure how I would take to such a thing. But I was about to find out.

We arrived on a Friday afternoon at one of the remote swamp and-marsh campgrounds in Ocklawaha, Florida, an unincorporated location near Ocala whose claim to fame is that in 1935, federal agents engaged in a shootout with the notorious Ma Barker and one of her sons. That one bullet-riddled day aside, the area is as quiet as a baby’s soft breathing, and therefore perfect for what we were about
to attempt.

That evening Robert led us in a general session, then explained that we were to enter into silence until the morning lauds (prayers) the following day. Wordlessly, we left the building where we’d gathered, and marched along a narrow path toward our cabins. Flashlights wove back and forth in our hands, casting shafts of light along the broken shells that crunched beneath our footsteps. Mosquitos hummed and
cicadas performed for us, their pitch rising to a crescendo then falling in step with the darkness. We kept our eyes down and our lips closed, lest we be tempted. I took long breaths periodically, drawing as much
thick Florida air as possible, then exhaled slowly.

In short, I became aware of who I am. Of me. Without the noise. Outside of the madness. By the next morning, I both welcomed the prayers that would open our mouths to speak and wished they’d never been written. In ten hours—and about six of those asleep—I’d fallen in love with silence. How could that be? How could so much change in so short a period? I don’t have the answer. I can only say it did. And this is where my affair with occasional moments spent in the wonder of “hush” began.

The labyrinth drew me in, not because of what it was, but because of what it was not. A labyrinth is not a maze. Mazes are designed to confound and confuse. They are puzzles to be solved. Finding your way in is no problem. Finding your way out becomes the goal. Labyrinths are not designed in complexity but as a single path. They are unicursal. One sets their feet at the entrance and, once inside, they walk a clear and narrow way, circling back and around until they find the center.

But that doesn’t mean labyrinths are simple; the quest of the walker is to let go of the world to draw closer to God. Do not love the world or anything in the world, the apostle John wrote. If anyone loves
the world, love for the Father is not in them. It is easy, I have found, to stay on the outside of the labyrinth
because it requires nothing of you in effort.

But it is easier, I have also found, to take one step and then another and another … because God expects everything from the one taking the journey and then gives back so much more than deserved.

By the end of my research, I wanted to walk the labyrinth daily. I wanted to build one in my back yard, for pity’s sake. But that impossibility—as it turned out—led to a far greater, more satisfying opportunity. And that opportunity led me here.

The story of the labyrinth’s history varies. Some resources say that they date back 4,000 years; others say 5,000. Either way, the implication is clear.

Labyrinths (not necessarily prayer labyrinths) were erected long before Christianity. Labyrinth drawings have been discovered on ancient carvings and petroglyphs (prehistoric rock carvings). Indications show they were used for a number of reasons—from pagan rituals to children’s games to places for a young man to propose marriage to the lady who had won his heart.

Eventually, the church saw a holy use for them and made it so.

That is, until somewhere between the 17th and 18th centuries when a new concern arose: were those who walked upon the paths practicing the prayer labyrinth for the purpose of drawing closer to God or had
it become more of a diversion than its original sacred purpose?

In recent years, churches, hospitals, and parks have resurrected the labyrinth, encouraging those who will to take a deep breath and to walk within the winding paths … inhaling deeply and then exhaling slowly to escape the cares of today’s complicated world … to find solace within silence … and to discover a new level of a deep relationship with God.

Walking the labyrinth is not meant to replace prayer but to aid seekers in finding that quiet place where they can hear God whisper after leaving behind the wind, the earthquake, and the fire. But more
on that later.

All this … but whoever heard of journaling a labyrinth? Journaling a labyrinth is a completely new—but delightful—concept. I’m not 100% sure it began solely on my family room sofa, but until the year I discovered the folded piece of paper, I’d certainly never heard of it. What I learned in my daily walks within my labyrinth journals is what I pray I can convey to you—especially with The Path of Questioning. I also pray the experience will open your heart to a deeper, more honest walk with God. This was my experience, and I see no reason why it cannot be yours as well.

So come. Journey with me.