Come to the River - A Short Story

I see a man off in the distance and I am concerned for him. His clothes are in tatters, his face is dirty, and he always looks so tired and hungry. I call out to him and he smiles at my approach.

“It is good to see you again,” he says. “How are you doing?”

“I am well,” I reply, “and how are you today?”

“I’m alive,” he says faintly and I notice his eyes focus into the distance for a moment. I can feel the pain in him. Despair.

“Will you walk with me?” I ask him.

“Certainly. It is lonely in the wilderness.”

I nod in agreement. I don’t think he can perceive my sadness although I do not hide it from him. He doesn’t ask where we are going and I think that maybe this time he will drink from the river. Maybe this time he will agree to join with us as we gather around the streams of life.

When he sees where we are going he doesn’t protest. We stand looking over the river amidst the lush green and the trees that are nourished by the clear running water. He squints, not understanding what he is looking at. The side of his lip curls up and he shakes his head slowly.

“You should come with me out to the wilderness,” he says to me.

“I do,” I reply, “and we haven’t found anywhere worth living in that desert.”

“I get lonely when you’re away,” he says quietly.

I put my hands on his shoulders and look into his gaunt and shallow eyes. “Then come and stay with me,” I say, a tear welling up in my own eye. “Do not go out into the wilderness anymore. Spend time by the river, drink the pure water and let it wash you. Join with us and you will not be lonely. You can still go out into the desert but make your home here and be filled with good things.”

He looks at me, eyes unstaring.

“Is it so hard to see?” I ask pointing at river, the village, and the city in the distance. “Come to the river, be filled, thirst no more, learn to be clean, clothe yourself in new clothes, eat with us, laugh with us, we love you!”

“What is wrong with my clothes?” he asks suspiciously.

“They are in tatters friend!”

He huffs at me and eyes up my own garments, recently washed and still quite new.

“It’s not like that,” I say. “You go out into the wilderness in rags. Do they protect you from the heat of the sun or the cold of the night? Do they shelter you in a storm? I am concerned for your well-being.”

“The river is for soft people,” he said at last. “None of you know what it is like out in the world. None of you know how to survive in the heat or the cold. The river makes you soft.”

I looked at him in disbelief. Malnourished, limping, and hunched over; even the least of the river dwellers could stand the wastes better than him. But he did not understand this.

He turned to leave.

“Wait,” I say as I take off my coat. “Take this,” and I wrap it around his shoulders.

A look of pain and surprise came over him and then a grateful smile and tears. “Thank you,” he choked. “It is so cold in the wilderness at night. You have always been such a good friend to me.” And with that he turned and stumbled away from the river, thirsty, hungry, dirty, limping, and wretched to go back to living among the hyenas and buzzards; and I wept for him.

Knowing too much and Knowing how much I don't know...

I am at a strange spot in my life. I have a rigorous four year BA under my belt with a few extra courses just for fun and a nearly completed Master's degree. To my family and most friends this sounds like quite the achievement and they are proud of me, thinking I know oh so much. To my professors and many of my peers I am just a Masters' student, not that that is a bad thing, but it's common and not all that impressive. Now let me say this straight from the beginning, I am not looking to impress people; not by being smarter than anyone or measuring up anywhere on the academic scale. The issue I am facing right now is knowing enough to know that I don't know nearly as much as I thought I knew.

I thought that I had already come to this spot and just accepted it. There is a certain humility that most college students learn in there senior years, that they are just little students and that whatever grandiose ideas and firm foundations of knowledge they had are often little more than puffs of air. Briercrest is especially good at teaching these lessons because of the academic rigor, honesty, and pastoral care of each of the professors. Apparently the lesson gets re-taught at the Masters' level too but for me it wasn't so much my classes that did it this time as it was simply living every day life.


I was home for Thanksgiving enjoying some fantastic family time when my grandmother puts her hands just above my son's head (oh yeah, I have a son now just in case you read this blog and don't know my personally) and said that she was transferring energy to him. I asked where she had learned to transfer energy and she said that a woman did it to her not long ago and that it got rid of her headache. I explained that what she was doing was called Reiki and how channeling life force was important to some religions. She asked if it was dangerous. I thought about it and decided that it wasn't in this instance. She laughed at me and said that I knew too much. I agreed. I know enough to make things more complicated than they should be and I know enough to be dangerous.

What does it mean to know enough to be dangerous? It means that you know enough to make your own 'informed decisions' and can explain the reasoning behind them to convince people know know less than you that you are right, but you don't know enough to realize that you're quite wrong and unintentionally leading others astray.


On the other hand sometimes I feel like I barely know anything at all. This experience of a new marriage and a new child and new social setting has had me in a constant state of not understanding. Often times I do not understand how my wife works or how I should work in relation to her. (I think this is normal?) I do not know what the future holds for us, even less so now that she is unable to finish her degree here at Briercrest. After a long hard year of bad health and raging pregnancy hormones I am still unsure how or why the landscape changed now that the dust is settling. Life time friendships, gone; relationship with Briercrest, marred; peers, distant; family, here but I am unable to relate to them; my wife, lonely; and I am unable to fix any of them. And I tried in every way I knew how, I advocated, I mediated, I listened to all parties, I prayed, I took action, and at the end of the day I am exhausted and can barely wrap my mind around what happened. And then there are the larger issues in the world that I simply can not see far enough, do not understand and have no answer to; Russia's 'propaganda laws' and the suffering of real people, Western ideologies as neo-colonialism, Japan's nuclear waste pouring into the ocean, Canada's First Nations issues, the crisis in Syria, and Miley Cyrus just to name a few.


I used to think that maybe theology would have all the answers, that magical mixture of the very best humanity had to offer and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Instead I find myself not relying on theology for answers but, as always, upon God through faith. This is not to say that theology has been a wasted pursuit, far from it! The love of God and the love of wisdom are the most excellent pursuits in the world and the foundation for all other good pursuits. True theology brings us to the point of faith though, and in this instance it was through knowing too much and knowing that I know too little.