The Restory Retreat Centre

  My Purpose The Conversation Elements From The Conversation Music In the song, the "plan" she gives God is a plea for an end. • She is not asking God for a new path, but she is giving God a proposal or a roadmap to end this chapter of suffering ("To close this affair"). • It is an act of surrender: she can no longer bear the weight of the past, so she reaches out and says to the Creator, as it were, "Here's how we can end this pain. Help me to end it." There is an irony in the lyrics. Sometimes the only "plan" we can form is to admit that we have run out of plans. By saying "I'm giving God a plan," she may be saying, "I've decided that this 'affair' with sorrow is over; now God, you have to do the rest to make it happen." It is a shift from passive victim to someone who sets a boundary. May you gradually, through discovery, come home to your purpose. With our love. George & Matilda

1. I walk down the street.  There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  I fall in.  I am lost … I am hopeless.  It isn’t my fault.  It takes forever to find a way out.  2. I walk down the same street.  There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  I pretend I don’t see it.  I fall in again.  I can’t believe I’m in the same place.  But it isn’t my fault.  It still takes a long time to get out.  3. I walk down the same street.  There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  I see it is there.  I still fall in … it’s a habit.  My eyes are open.  I know where I am.  It is my fault.  I get out immediately.  4. I walk down the same street.  There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  I walk around it.  5. I walk down another street.  PORTIA NELSON

Photo by George Angus The toad beneath the harrow knows exactly where each tooth point goes; The butterfly upon the road preaches contentment to that toad.                                                            Rudyard Kipling I am not exaggerating when I say that every morning, when I mount my bicycle and turn onto the main dirt road that passes our house, I think of Kipling’s poem. Traveling by car you rush past landmarks and speed over bumps and stones. But with cycling it’s a different story. Very early in the morning, with the sun just above the horizon, some of the bigger stones in the road even cast shadows.  The section next to the camp of the cows with their calves is particularly rough. The slope leading down to the dams where Sebastien does bass fishing has about a 100 metres of hard, smooth...

Photograph by George Angus With the water level so low after the drought we are now able to see landmarks usually submerged under the surface of Zaaihoekdam. One of that is the old road leading past our farm to Wakkerstroom. Before the dam was built years ago, it was a fairly straight and much shorter route leading into town. Now we have to drive much further all along the perimeter of the dam. The old inhabitants of the area tell us about homesteads, a bridge and obviously the old road that apparently disappeared for good under water once the dam started filling up. Now, with the drought some of it make an appearance once again, amazingly intact after all those years in its wet coffin. Every time I look at the old road, Rudyard Kipling’s poem comes to mind: The Way through the Woods They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods Bef...

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”                                                                           ...