I’m hiking down a mountain. With a group, but I’m alone. Hikes go like that, usually. You do them with people but you really do them alone. And I’m thinking about Narnia again, about all this green and all this hope and I’m, somewhere in my head, memorizing the breakup speech I’ve planned; I’m bracing myself for the pain of learning not to love you anymore. 

God stitched pain into the universe. And then he made flowers to remind us that he’s coming back. “Aslan shakes his mane, and we shall have spring again…” It’s all just background noise to pain, I think to myself. Background noise. Pain is the main event. It makes me think of Ginny, how she was the most beautiful soul that anyone who knew her had ever met, but cancer made her body so ugly. Pain was the main event of her life. And yet. And yet, isn’t there a Bible verse about this momentary affliction being swallowed up by the eternal weight of glory? Pain was her whole story, but that story was just a flash compared with the glory that lay beyond it. 

I always feel like I’ve stumbled into a different world, when I’m in the woods like this. I try to greet every tree along the path, so none feels slighted or ignored. My fingers trace their friendly roughness, my legs burning slightly when the hill becomes steep. I’m alone with the rocks, and it’s okay. I’m small, moving through a world too beautiful for me to ever capture in words — and I suppose that’s okay too. There is pain even in the beauty, though. The pain of knowing that the waterfall will go on making its music after I am gone, and I will miss it. The pain of forgetting already, being incapable of etching the notes into my soul. The longing to dance in each one without wondering what people would think. 

There are whispers; whenever I’m out among the trees, I can hear them. In winter they wail and moan. “All of creation groans,” waiting for redemption. Crying out for wholeness. October is a glorious month: the world hasn’t decided what to be yet. The plants don’t know it is time to die, they are still unfurling boldly, vibrant, clinging to life with wild abandon. And at the peak of life, they whisper. I can hear it, when I listen close: ‘He’s back, he’s back.’ ‘He’s coming.’ ‘Aslan has returned.’ 

Just when we thought he might be a myth after all, when he’d been gone for so long that memory began to feel like legend. 

That’s when he comes back. And the whole story feels like pain, pain, pain. Glory is the epilogue. 

Because you know, epilogues break the fourth wall a bit. It’s a note from Author to reader, the story doesn’t end once you’ve read the last page, just because you close the book. It’s only just beginning. And don’t you wonder what the rest of the story is? I do.