February 23, 2018

Lisa C. Krueger

MY WILL BE DONE

I went through a phase where I lived for God; I gave up thoughts and actions. My will was divine in the way that youth ministers said it could be if you repeated Thy Will Be Done. In this phase, I attended prayer breakfasts where they served pancakes on paper plates. Maybe because it was six in the morning, they were the best pancakes I ever tasted. My parents were beside themselves with concern for my lack of intellectual investigation. I was pretty sure I had never been happier. I had my first boyfriend, an evangelical who always prayed after we made out. He backpacked a lot and convinced me to become a backpacker for God. We hiked with converts who knew how to sing and climb at the same time. I fell from grace on our best ascent. At a Sierra Nevada pass where the ledge was two feet wide and the drop was sixty, I remembered I was afraid of heights. I am alone after all! I said. My companions, who dreamed of becoming missionaries, looked at me with dismay and hiked on ahead. Even my boyfriend. Didn’t God say that? I thought, crawling the rest of the way on my hands and knees.

from Rattle #58, Winter 2017

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Lisa C. Krueger: “One of the deepest pleasures of writing for me is the mystery of creative acts: I never really know what will show up in a poem. This piece came to me one day when I was working very diligently on something very different. Above my writing desk is an Antonio Machado quote: ‘Walker, there is no path, you make the path as you walk.’” (web)

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