It´s hard to describe it, this feeling of ever onwards, ever upwards, all with a great weight upon your back. My head aches with new heights and grasping attempts to take in all of my new surroundings. Sometimes it seems as though there are mists all around me, overcoming me and my confusion grows greater by the moment. Sometimes I call out to my guide and am only answered by the eerie echoing stillness and the pounding rythmn of my own heart. Tomorrow might bring great triumph or great despair, I´m never sure of which, and when I lay my weary head down to sleep at night I reject all such thoughts and dealings. I am a daughter of praise endowed with the gift of joy but joy seems to have no place here in this dense wilderness. The paths I walk are solitary and yet out of the shrouded mists come haunted faces and I realize I am not so entirely alone. I am accompanied by teeming multitudes of other souls who are the living dead. I shirk and grimace at the petrified souls and turn silently away when they look searchingly into my eyes believing that my path can have no crossroads with theirs.
     Then all at once the mist clears and I reach a bright, shining hilltop from which I can see things clearly and as they really are. I myself am transformed from a dusty, weary traveler to a King´s daughter and one especially chosen to walk these dark paths as a light in the wilderness, a city on a hilltop, a lighthouse on a dark and stormy night. Those grim souls that surround me are in reality sons and daughters of the King, prodigals every one, who have lost their way the moment they took their first breath and never managed to find it again. And now, they doggedly make their trails through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And on this gleaming hilltop, I surmise that with help from the King I must reach out and reclaim that which had only recently seemed so abhorrent to me. A true light has no real meaning but in darkness for that is where it is needed and recognized the most. It may feel quite comfortable in a room full of chandeliers and candelight but its highest use can only be ascertained in the depths of despair.
     Taking one last glance around me, I resume my journey. Onward and upward I climb and once again the darkness engulfs me but now I have my bearings and the next time I see a haunted face I hope to guide it ever so steadily toward the one true light and the man of sorrows who alone can make ways in the wilderness.