The Rutted Road

When I was a teenager I listened to Carol King's Tapestry album a LOT! I loved her style and the meaning in her words. I think it is a timeless collection of songs and my kids know this album just as well as I did all those years ago. One song ,Tapestry makes me ponder a bit. The words are poetic and have a deeper meaning... at least to me. It speaks of a lonely traveler who is looking for something and at one point reaches for something golden hanging in a tree and his hand pulls back emptiness. I often wonder how many times I am looking for something that appears real and in the end it seems to be nothing at all.

This weekend we went to Rexburg to witness Carly's graduation from BYU-I. Hours before we arrived I received a call from her that indicated that she would actually walk but not be finished with all of her classes until April. A very long story of why she did not pass one of her classes is unnecessary. She was distraught to say the least and humiliated. Carly takes great care in her classes and in most all of her life to the point where she puts great pressure on herself to be perfect.

I thought of these words in Tapestry of reaching for something and finding it unreal or unrealistic. Perfection is something golden we might all reach for but perfection will never be achieved.

I reflected on the blessing in Carly's life of failing a class and being human. By the time we arrived in Rexburg she understood why she was to stay in Rexburg another semester. She handled this imperfection with jokes about herself and laughed when others teased her about it as well. I was so impressed with her adaption to imperfection so quickly.

For along Carly's "rutted road" she will have moments, like all of mankind, that we reach for something that only One has attained in life. It is only through Him that we can find it in the eternities.

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the everchanging view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

Once amid the soft silver sadness in the sky
There came a man of fortune, a drifter passing by
He wore a torn and tattered cloth around his leathered hide
And a coat of many colors, yellow-green on either side

He moved with some uncertainty, as if he didn't know
Just what he was there for, or where he ought to go
Once he reached for something golden hanging from a tree
And his hand come down empty

Soon within my tapestry along the rutted road
He sat down on a river rock and turned into a toad
It seemed that he had fallen into someone's wicked spell
And I wept to see him suffer, though I didn't know him well

As I watched in sorrow, there suddenly appeared
A figure gray and ghostly beneath a flowing beard
In times of deepest darkness, I've seen him dressed in black
Now my tapestry's unraveling; he's come to take me back
He's come to take me back