I read this Exodus passage in my devotions after meeting with our son’s 3rd grade teacher yesterday. I haven’t searched for this passage, it has found me, falling perfectly on the day I need it. The 3rd grade teacher believes our son may be struggling with dyslexia. I believe she may be right. Funny thing is our nine-year-old son reads the Bible just fine. When he reads anything else, his tongue ties in knots. This makes no sense. Like faith, it can’t be explained. It just is. 

I close my eyes and there it is, rolling grass on rolling hills. I am a child again, redheaded like my son with a tongue that ties in knots with a speech impediment. The girls forcing me into the bathroom are older. Their laughter carries on the wind rolling down from the rolling hills onto our two-room country schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere. My pain going nowhere, going silent, going deep as these girls force me into the bathroom to say words I cannot say. My nowhere pain like my nowhere school now beautiful as I finally understand nearly forty years later all that rolled and did not roll in my life… 

The words I couldn’t say

The red-haired jokes that made me weep

The freckles all over my face

The belly-button poking out, not in

The One who made the rolling grass

made the rolling hills

made me.

And the things in my life that rolled. 

And didn’t roll.

My tongue that didn’t roll in the bathroom with those girls.

My hair and belly-button standing out, when all I wanted was “in” in the rolling years of childhood.

“My daughter wants to fit in,” my friend says softly some years back. And I hear her mother’s tears as we talk over the phone. And I smile as I say, “‘In’ isn’t always good for a girl.” 

There are things that roll out of a woman’s heart because of the things that didn’t roll well in her life. Compassion. Humility. Courage. Hope. Trust in the One who made the rolling hills.

I would not change the things in my life that didn’t roll when I was young

because they made me who I am now that I am old. 

And for all of you who think being in your forties is not old, try explaining to this generation about finding a phone booth when you had a flat tire or drinking out of a garden hose after riding in a car without air conditioning or riding in the bed of a pickup truck eating an ice cream cone with your dad speeding down the road spitting brown chewing tobacco out the window onto your vanilla ice cream as the rolling hills with the rolling grass rolled out of sight in the middle of nowhere. 

All that pain I thought went nowhere in the rolling of my youth 

went deep into my heart and rolled out sweetness years later.