It seems to me that Life in the Spirit is a kind of continuous Creek Walk. We in our various faith communities take a kind of Creek Walk pilgrimage together, moving forward downstream through time and change, through birth and youth, mid-life and old age, learning and laughing together, slipping, falling and regaining our balance again, helping one another at times, always with an eye to the wonder and beauty of it all, and always with a natural instinct to praise God who made us.

I love Ezekiel’s vision of a healing river flowing right out of the temple through the streets of Jerusalem. Over the years I’ve come to see that image of the healing river as a vision for the church in the world. Let’s take a closer look at the biblical text.

Ezekiel strikes me as a sixth century B.C. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was speaking to people who were every bit as disenfranchised as the African-American of the 1960’s. His audience was Israel in exile, a refugee people eking out a marginal existence in Babylon and singing homesick songs of Zion in the quiet of the night. They were second class citizens, at best, in Babylon, and that situation was not likely to change anytime soon. What does a prophet say to his kinsfolk at such a time as that? A prophet says, “I have a dream…”

I have a dream of Jerusalem restored, says Ezekiel. I have a dream that all twelve tribes of Israel live together again in the land that stretches out around Jerusalem. I have a dream, says Ezekiel, of our glorious Temple rebuilt and re-consecrated. I have a dream that God lives in our Temple and I dream that God causes a great river to flow from the Temple out, down, to irrigate our deserts and our waste places so that all around us an oasis blooms, trees produce abundant food, and leaves, for healing. And there will be very many fish!, says Ezekiel. I have a dream today.

Ezekiel’s dream sprang up like a geyser in the middle of a squatter’s camp, God’s answer to the sound of weeping and the fury of broken dreams. Now that dream survives as a vision for how God acts through the church to bring life to the world.

I said earlier that I like think of life in the Spirit as a kind of continuous Creek Walk. But that analogy only goes so far. Things don’t automatically go along swimmingly just because we happen to be people of faith. You know that. That’s reality. Ezekiel’s dream survives today because it accounts for reality. It was and it is God’s answer to the sound of weeping and the fury of broken dreams. It is a dream especially for exiles. That is to say, it’s a dream especially for people who feel cut off from the life-giving presence of God.

I have been in exile. My life in the Spirit stopped being a Creek Walk a few years ago and became more like a continuous running and ducking for cover. On December 13, 1994, the phone rang, waking me from a sound sleep. It was my sister Martha. She was crying. She told me that our parents had both been killed the day before in a car accident, a head-on collision. My husband and I boarded a plane to Chicago that afternoon to be with family and plan the funeral. Unbeknownst to us, that plane ride was to be the first of many, for in the course of that terrible, year we also grieved the deaths of my grandmother, my aunt and my sister-in-law. The phone call that announced the sudden death of my husband’s father the following New Year’s Eve seemed like the last straw.

But it wasn’t. You see, all of that happened the same year that Carlos and I had a series of disheartening doctor’s appointments that left us with the mind-numbing diagnosis: severe infertility. In all likelihood, we were told, we would never have children of our own.

I found myself exiled, cut off, it seemed, from before and from behind, robbed of my past, robbed of my imagined future. It wasn’t so much that I felt God’s absence, but that I feared God’s presence. What else would God do to me next? I wondered, irrationally. I was the associate pastor of a church at that time, and I found myself asking, where’s the healing river now? And I found myself afraid of the very God whose power it was to make me whole.

I took a leave of absence from my church. The days stretched out before and behind me in wide swaths. It helped to have someone to sit with, someone who listened to me and then said to me, in one way or another and over and over again, “Yes, I can see how this must be for you, Ruth, and I know you can’t see beyond here just now, but I believe I can. And I believe there is hope. Do you trust me?”

A turning point came for me on another December night. Our church had a tradition of hosting a Living Nativity pageant for the town. Carlos and I had slipped out of our house to join the crowd following Mary and Joseph in a kind of procession leading from the church steps down the road to the barn attached to the church manse.

(Now, in order to understand this story, you need to know that when I was an infant, my older sister Gail saw so many people walk by my bassinet, stop, look inside and say, “Hi Ruth!” that she thought my name was “Hi Ruth!”)

After a long wait in the manse driveway, we finally arrived at the front of the line and stood before the splendid tableau of Mary, Joseph, shepherds, real sheep!, Three Kings, the baby Jesus and a ladder of little angels extending up the barn steps to heaven. Here it is! I thought with satisfaction, our annual enactment of how Jesus came to be with us on earth, and I smiled to see familiar faces again. Suddenly I heard a small voice. The voice said, “Hi Ruth!”

I scanned the faces to see who’d said it. But I never found out, because then, I heard it again from somewhere else, “Hi Ruth!” And again, “Hi Ruth!” A low murmuring of “Hi Ruths” ensued, and I saw little hands waving and small faces lighting up in smiles. Why I even got a wink and a “Hi Ruth” from one of the stately Kings!

In something of a daze I tore myself away. Carlos and I cut through the streams of people back to our home, where I broke down and wept. God, the one I’d been afraid of, had come to me on that dark night. God, the one I’d been afraid of, had spoken to me through the mouths of children, shepherd’s waves, and the wink of a King. What God said was, simply, “Hi Ruth.”

God also seemed to say, I am in the world, and my people are in the world, and this stream of pilgrims flowing toward the stable and the warm pool of light that marks my presence in the world, this—is a healing river for you. Yes, you. Come, wade in the water. Let the children splash you with their “Hi Ruths.” I am in the world and you are in the world, and I know you by name, even by your secret name. Isn’t that enough?

It was. That night marked the beginning of the end of my exile. My life has changed a lot since that December day. The details are not important. What is important is that, slowly, slowly, I grew to trust God once more.

Ezekiel sat with God’s people in Babylon day after day, week after week, listening, and then saying to them—in so many words, and over and over again—”Yes, I can see how this must be for you. I know you can’t see beyond here just now, but I believe I can. And I believe there is hope. Do you trust me?”

I wonder who you will turn to when you are in exile? When you find yourself cut off from the life-giving presence of God? Will it be a friend? A counselor? A dream? The Scriptures? What about the church?

I dream of our churches being filled with exiles. I dream of us turning to each other and saying “Hi,” and offering words of compassionate hope. And I know that, because of God’s irrepressible presence in the world, exile is always temporary. It may be prolonged, but it won’t last forever.

If you’ve been baptized, then your baptism is your surest sign of this hope of which I speak. By it you know that if anybody asks you who you are, or if anything causes you to question who you are, or why you are, or if the meaning of absolutely everything seems to bottom out, you can still find it within yourself to say that you are a child of God. And if a child of God, then vulnerable to the dreams that come from God, homesick for the presence of God and the company of God’s people, thirsty for the water of God, aching for God’s healing.

If I were you, I’d wear your rubber boots to church from now on. Because I have this idea that someday, maybe soon, all the baptismal fonts in the front of all of our churches around the country will start a-gurgling and a-bubbling…and there we’ll be, ankle-deep in living water, heading down stream, out the door, down the front steps.

And you’ll be in the river because you are the river: You!—a swirl or a splash or a molecule of goodness in the river that heals life.

Ezekiel says, “Everything will live where the river goes.” Perhaps you can’t see that just now. But I believe I can. And I believe there is hope. Do you trust me?

Lydia Talbot: Ruth, you talk about your parents and that sense of separation in being cut off when they were killed instantly in 1994. In our brief time, can you tell us who they were and how they were a source of inspiration in your life —Robert and Jean Boling.

Ruth Boling: Well, I like to think that who I am trying to be in my life is the best of my mother combined with the best of my father combined with whatever is unique in me. They were my teachers in the faith and role models and I was fortunate to be able to go to seminary with my father and even take one of his classes, so he was my teacher as well.