Talking To My Shadow
I was 10 when I gave my life to Christ, and I had no idea what it would do to my house.
My mother found out quickly. And she decided, almost immediately, that her new mission in life was to make sure I wasn’t “brainwashed.” That was her word. Religion, in her mind, was an infection, and she was going to keep every trace of it away from me if she had anything to say about it.
Bibles became contraband.
If she found one in my room, I was punished, and not for an evening. For months. Prayer was forbidden in the house. Christian music was out of the question. She hunted for any sign of my faith the way some parents hunt for drugs, and she was ruthless about it. She did not want a daughter who knew God, and she made that very clear.
So I learned to hide. I kept a Bible tucked wherever I thought she was least likely to look, and I moved it often. I prayed with one eye open, listening for footsteps in the hall. Every conversation with God at home happened in a kind of crouch.
But there was one stretch of every day that was mine.
The walk to school took about 45 minutes.
Forty five minutes of sidewalk and crosswalks and the occasional barking dog behind a fence. 45 minutes of not being around my mother. I can still remember the lightness of turning the corner at the end of our street and knowing she couldn’t see me anymore.
And it was on that walk that I started a habit I’ve never told many people about.
I talked to my shadow.
In the mornings the sun would be low, and my shadow would stretch out on the pavement beside me, long and thin, matching me step for step. At some point (I don’t remember the first time) I started pretending it was Jesus. Walking right next to me. Close enough to touch, if shadows could be touched.
So I talked to Him. Out loud, sometimes, when nobody was around. I asked Him questions about things I’d read in my contraband Bible the night before. I told Him what I was afraid of and what I was thinking about. I told Him about my mother. And over and over, more than anything else, I thanked Him for being there, for walking with me, for never leaving.
Those walks were the closest thing I had to a sanctuary. They felt like stepping into the holy of holies, every single morning.
These days I can pray anywhere I like.
No one hunts for my Bibles. I have several, scattered around the house, a couple of them with broken spines from years of use. I pray in the car, in the kitchen, at my desk, out loud in my own living room, with both eyes closed and no one listening at the door. I play worship music while I cook.
And I do pray. I want to be clear about that. My relationship with God is much, much deeper now than it was at 10, in nearly every way I can measure.
But there’s something I had then that I don’t quite have now. A kind of cherishing. A sense that I’d been let into the inner room. When I finally got to talk to God on that sidewalk, it felt like crossing a threshold. Now, with the threshold open all the time, I walk across it without noticing.
I’ve been trying to understand why.
“The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night” (Psalm 121:5-6). The Hebrew word for shade there is tsel. It’s the same word for shadow.
The Lord is your shadow on your right hand.
I didn’t know that at ten. I was just a lonely girl talking to the dark shape on the sidewalk. But the psalm goes on: “The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore” (121:8). Going out and coming in. To school and back home again, twice a day, five days a week.
David uses the same word when he says, “in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy” (Psalm 63:7). There’s something about shadow in the Hebrew imagination that means nearness. You can only be in someone’s shadow if you’re very close to them.
The disciples on the road to Emmaus walked with Jesus without recognizing Him.
Two of them were heading home after the crucifixion, talking over everything that had happened, and Jesus “drew near and went with them” (Luke 24:15). They didn’t know who He was. He walked beside them and talked with them, explaining the Scriptures, all the way to the village.
It was only later, at the table, that their eyes were opened. And their first words to each other afterward were, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road?” (24:32).
On the road. Not in the temple, not in a house of prayer. On a walk.
I think about that verse whenever I remember that sidewalk. I’m not saying my shadow was literally Jesus. I was a kid, and I knew it was a shadow. But I believe with my whole heart that He was walking with me on that road, and my heart burned, and I knew it even then.
Walking with God was the original design.
Before there was a temple or a tabernacle or a priesthood, Adam and Eve “heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8). God walked. And people walked with Him. A few chapters later, Enoch is remembered for one thing: “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him” (5:24).
I find it moving that the very first picture of fellowship with God in the Bible isn’t a ritual or some kind of ceremony. It’s a walk in the evening air. I’d stumbled into the oldest form of prayer there is without knowing it existed.
In Hebrew, rare and precious are the same word.
At the beginning of 1 Samuel, before God called the boy Samuel in the night, the narrator says, “the word of the LORD was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision” (1 Samuel 3:1). The Hebrew word for rare there is yaqar. It’s also the word for precious. Rubies are yaqar. Wisdom is yaqar. And the word of the Lord, when it was scarce, was yaqar.
I think that explains a great deal about the difference between my sidewalk and my kitchen. When the Word was contraband, it was precious, because it was rare. When prayer could get me punished for months, every prayer I managed was a treasure. Scarcity and value are tangled together, in Hebrew and in the human heart.
There’s a sobering story about what happens on the other side of that.
During the reign of King Josiah, workers repairing the temple found a scroll. “I have found the Book of the Law in the house of the LORD,” the high priest said (2 Kings 22:8). They brought it to the king, and when he heard it read, he tore his clothes.
The scroll had been lost. Not in some enemy’s house, but in the house of God. In the one building in Judah built specifically to honor Him, His Word had been set aside so long that nobody remembered it was there.
I guarded my Bible like contraband in a house that hated God. Judah lost theirs in the house built for Him. I don’t think my faith was stronger than theirs by nature. I think abundance has a way of making precious things invisible.
The way into the holy place is wide open now.
Hebrews says we “have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain” (10:19-20). When Jesus died, the curtain in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51). The inner room, the holy of holies, the place only the high priest could enter once a year, is open.
I don’t have to sneak in anymore. I don’t have to wait for a 40 minute window when my mother can’t see me. That’s a gift beyond measuring, and I don’t want to lose sight of it in all this nostalgia.
Perhaps I’m romanticizing a hard time.
Those years weren’t beautiful. I was a frightened child being punished for loving God. I would not trade my freedom now for that fear, not for any feeling in the world. And I know better than to measure the value of prayer by how it feels. Some of my most important prayers as an adult have felt like nothing at all.
But I’ve wondered whether what I miss isn’t the secrecy or even the scarcity. I think it might be the dependence. At ten, I had no one else. The shadow on the sidewalk was the only one I could tell anything to. Now I have friends, fellow believers, and a full life, and somewhere along the way I may have let God become one voice among many instead of the one I ran to first.
Jesus had a word for a church that had drifted like that.
To the believers in Ephesus, He said, “I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance,” and He commended them for a great deal. “But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first” (Revelation 2:2, 4-5).
I don’t think I’ve abandoned my first love. But I think I’ve let it settle into routine. And the remedy He gave Ephesus was surprisingly practical: do the works you did at first.
Maybe for me that means walking again. No headphones, no podcast, no phone. Just the morning sun at my back and my shadow stretched out on the pavement ahead of me, the way it used to be.
I’m 40-something now and I know a shadow is just a shadow. But I also know who walks on my right hand, who keeps my going out and my coming in, and who walked beside me down that sidewalk every morning when there was no one else.
I think I’d like to talk to Him there again.
