Lead Me Where

I was fifty-six minutes away from weekend freedom. Friday does not beat around the bush about things, and I’m seated in class by 7:30am each week. But that was hours ago; it’s now 11:54am, and I’m on my way to Church and its Doctrines. The entry way to Sweeting is customarily busy, with students bustling in and out, going to class, coming from the library, going to lunch. I hurry into the building on the footsteps of a young man who is kind enough to hold the glass door open for me.

The public safety worker standing just inside the building nods approvingly at the ID hanging proudly around my neck, and I instinctively put my hand up to stop my keys from swinging as I pace past the elevators and towards the stairs. After the whole episode wherein I broke my pinky toe during orientation week and spent the next several weeks hobbling around campus, I became rather accustomed to taking the elevator. I am currently in the process of weaning myself off the elevator, which is actually easier than one would think, especially when my classroom is one floor up, and the elevators insist upon making strange noises and occasionally jumping several inches after they have come to a complete stop.

My life is not in danger when I ride Moody’s elevator’s but sometimes it feels that way. So I take the stairs.

But I’m barely past the elevators, two of which have just arrived and are emptying their studious contents into the lobby, when something catches my eye. I am just about to round the corner and pass the library when I notice it. The push of people who I entered the building with dissipated significantly when I passed the front stairwell, and again at the elevators, and I am now briefly alone in the hallway.

So I stop to look. I stand next to the library window, one hand steadying the purse on my shoulder, the other still clutching my lanyard, and I look.

There is a yellow Post-It note stuck neatly on the windowsill that separates the library from the rest of Sweeting. Whoever left the Post-It note was clearly worried that it would un-stick itself from the sill and drift softly to the ground, for they left a metal fork on top of the note, thus securing it indefinitely.

I leaned down to read the small, neat handwriting that lined the yellow bit of paper. “But Jesus often withdrew to quiet places and prayed”. The Post-It quoted from Luke.

I stood where I was for a moment or two longer, considering this message from the Word of God, secured to the Sweeting windowsill by a fork lying neatly on top of it. I don’t know why someone wrote the note, why they left it where they did, or what would possess someone to abandon a perfectly good fork, but I’m intensely curious. And I rather liked hearing from the Word of God, too.

~Natalia