When Some Things in Your Life Aren’t What You Hoped: The Emmaus Reality

I once stayed on the Emmaus Road. Walked it early in the cool of the morning.  I haven’t thought of those hot, sticky nights in a wobbly twin bed on the Emmaus Road at Yad Hashmona for years, till I opened my Bible this morning, to my next reading in the book of Luke, and there it was, in my scratchy, Bic-blue handwriting: July 6th, 2018, on the Emmaus Road.  (Or maybe it’s because yesterday I slammed the van door shut on my own foot and I’m walking with a self-inflicted limp and every step is this hobbling tenderness, but –ha! — either which way, regardless.)  Eight years ago. Nearly to the day.  Sometimes the greatest mercy is that you don’t see the whole map.  The woman who wrote that margin note — July 6th, on the Emmaus Road — she didn’t know that she was in the Before Times, before so many Terrible Things, before the call and the coroner and the police report and everything that’s unraveled since, before the global pandemic, before stories I wanted to write myself out of and the pacing of sleepless nights and the roads I found myself on that felt like some […]