Walk Beside Me

Before I started taking growth hormone in fourth grade, I topped out at about 4’2″.  I spent most of my time looking up at faces and dangling my legs off of kitchen chairs and school desks.

I was tiny.  Then, as now, I was so skinny that whenever I turned sideways I disappeared. My chicken legs, the ones I inherited from my dad, were constantly in overdrive just trying to keep up with the pace of my peers and my parents.  Stride for stride,  I seemed to always bring up the rear.  No matter how hard I spun my legs, I could never keep up.

Instead of picking me up, my mom and dad always urged me to walk, but too often they had to scoop me up to get there faster, wherever “there” was.

I remember being on a field trip to Maymont Park, a park in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, with one of my middle school classes.  We were walking the long pathways up and down its hills, and I was hauling it as fast as I could.  Behind everyone else.  Once in a while, my teacher would look backwards just to make sure I was within some safe distance from her and the rest of the pack.  I guess you could say I had a reputation for being the slow kid.

In many ways, I’ve spent my life trying to catch up, and at some point along the way, I got used to trailing behind.

♦

Fast forward to senior high school.  It was summer, and I was at the annual youth conference at Montreat, North Carolina.  Erica, my best friend throughout high school, handed me a card with a small poem on it.  I can’t tell you the words of that poem anymore, but I still remember the last couple lines:

Do not walk in front of me.

Do not walk behind me.

Walk beside me and be my friend.

After I read the card, she told me that she noticed that I always seemed to walk in back of her even when I didn’t have to.  I never noticed that about myself, but I believed her because I knew how normal it felt for me to walk behind others.

On a certain level I’m sure that walking behind others was more comfortable for me.

“Walking behind” isn’t partnership, though.

Whenever I walk behind, I lose out on being in full relationship with the one ahead of me. When we walk alongside, we fully participate of each other’s experience.  We see what we see together.  We arrive at our destinations with one another.  We experience life with each other.

When we walk beside one another, without saying a word, we claim each other as partners in the journeys we take together.

I still fall behind others when I walk.  I always have to remind myself to kick it into gear and catch up.  But, experiencing the stuff of life “alongside of” is well worth the extra effort.

This is the healing walk.  Walk beside me along this pathway towards wholeness, and if I fall behind, stop for a second so I can catch up.

I promise I’ll do the same for you.