Peniel - Day 4...8:28am

Dalyn is not my given name. It is a nickname, a chosen name. It is a combination of my given first and middle names David and Glyn. I remember when I began using it I told my father that it hadn’t anything to do with not liking my “real” name. I do. David is a good name, but that’s always been him, not me. I am a junior. But I felt like God was giving me a fresh start and with it a fresh, new name. That was years ago, and I never really thought much about it again. Dalyn is my name now, and it was simply a combination of my given names. Nothing more, nothing less. But I never quite lost track of the idea that God gave me that name.

This morning, after I read my daily reflection, topic “stepping into the sunlight”, I suddenly had the urge to see if my name had a meaning attached to it. So I hooked up the good old wireless laptop to the internet and looked it up. There it was, Dalyn, a boy’s name originating in Scotland, meaning from the little field. My heart burst with joy.

That probably sounds foolish. Allow me to try to explain how much that simple phrase meant to me. I am not a country boy. Those who know me can attest to this. I love the city. The shopping, shows, galleries, streets, lights, everything. I love it. And I doubt I could go long without a little dose of it. Wilderness living is not for me. The pioneers did not have it good, thank you very much.

That said, my best moments in life, my most conscious contacts with God, have always been in nature. My greatest moments of peace, and the times I can remember being truly happy in the moment - not from engaging in some activity that allowed me to escape like shopping, or a concert, or a show in the city, but moments of being totally rooted in the moment on this earth and content to be so, from my childhood until now, have almost always had a field involved.

My best moments as a child, when I felt closest to my father, when I never doubted his love and acceptance for me, where everything was right with the world and good and life was worth living even if the work was hard took place in hay meadows all over Nacogdoches county. Later, as a preteen and young teenager, when I hurt so bad I couldn’t stand it anymore and didn’t happen to have anything chemical to change the way I felt, I would slip out of my house at night into this field behind it, climb this one particular tree at the edge of that little field and gaze out over the clearing and up at the stars. I cried up in that tree more times than I could count. It was the one place I could always find release, where I could usually be able to find a moment of peace. It was where I felt close enough to talk to God more honestly than I ever could in church or anywhere else and tell him how much I hurt and how angry I was with him. No, he didn’t strike me down for that, he gave me peace.

And now, when I had to find a way to connect with God on a deeper level before I died, I didn’t run to the city and its distractions, I went to the wilderness. I camped in the woods on the edge of a field, and walked often in the field feeling like I was closest there to what Adam had in the garden when he walked with God and talked with God. The night the neighboring property owners ran me out, I spent my last moments in my new special place, on the edge of that field, talking to my father, awed by the big sky full of stars overhead, and, full of pain and anger, peace creeped in. There’s just something peaceful about a field to me. They are little islands of contentment.

Even now, in the place I retreated to after having to leave the very isolated, I am on the edge of a field. It’s the one part of this place I love. It’s the one aspect that made it acceptable as a place to continue my quest. And the fact that I get a better signal here didn’t hurt. But I digress.

It’s like God was saying to me you are Dalyn. You are the part of the little boy that came from the field. That connected with me. That knew and believed that life was good. The one who knew peace. You are the man born of that place. And when you leave the field you can take it with you, because you are from it. After all these years using this name and never even thinking it might have a meaning, I feel like it was God telling me that he wants that connection as much as I, that I can have that peace and contentment and connection and closeness and permission to feel all the pain and all the joy and not have to run from it.

I don’t know. I imagine that may look quite foolish from the outside. But from the inside it feels like God reaching down and touching the deepest, most special places and moments of my childhood, the times when I experienced respite from the pain without engaging in one form of escapism or another, concentrated all of those fragments of peace and contentment and said this is what you are from, this is what you are meant to be, this is where I want to take you, inside, this is what is at your core, under the wounds.
You are from the field.