Or… In Loving Memory of Frankincense the Squirrel
It’s Christmas, and Poppy is feeling a bit Guidepost-y at the keyboard. The computer kind, while reflecting on the musical kind.
Y’see, there are weekends soaked in such dense holiness you can practically feel the prayer saturation in the ground. Like the whole place is inside Billy Graham’s microwave. The Walk to Emmaus is one of those weekends. It is a 72-hour retreat for people who want to reclaim, find something new, or grow in their Christian faith.
I did the pilgrim walk last spring and decided I wanted to extend the spiritual afterglow by serving on the music team at the subsequent fall walk. It was lovely to play on the music team, providing the soundtrack for other people’s spiritual breakthroughs. During the six months in between, we had many gruelingly long days of church rehearsals and I thought, well, at least when the time comes to do the job, it will simply be glorious. Y’know, like the glory of lugging a digital piano across gravel in the rain.
But, yeah… rather than swaying happily to well-prepared worship with the pilgrims, I spent most of the time panicking over the tinny sounds of the camp’s digital keyboard and obsessively checking the four-page setlist like it was a Dead Sea Scroll. Everyone else was having radiant mountaintop moments with God—crying, praising, getting spiritually wrecked and restored. Meanwhile, I’m shivering in the too-high A/C and wondering if anyone noticed I messed up the bridge in “Oceans.”
It’s not that I didn’t want to meet the Spirit. I just… didn’t. Not in the big, theatrical ways. I just felt a little like the hired help at a wedding banquet—delivering the wine, but not invited to dance and still expected to nail the key change.
By the end of the weekend, I was really tired, a little spiritually hangry, and mildly jealous of every person who had been hammered by grace while I was wrangling the PowerPoint to make sure the lyrics on the big screen were the same ones the team was singing.
And then I ran over a squirrel.
I was heading home, maybe ten minutes from the retreat center, still riding the emotional residue of the closing ceremony, when a little gray blur darted out in front of my car. I hit the brakes. Too late. The thud was sickening. I sat there in my car, stunned, tears welling—not just for the little furball, but for the whole strange, hollow ache that had followed me all weekend and the end of that tiny life was what finally let some emotion in.
I have since named him Frankincense. It felt appropriate. One of the wise men’s gifts, cut short on the road. Gold felt too optimistic, and myrrh didn’t have the right energy.
In that ridiculous, awful moment, something in me finally cracked open. I hadn’t had my big moment with God in the candlelit chapel or during the fourth verse of “How Great Thou Art.” I’d had it on the shoulder of a backroad, staring at a tiny creature who never saw me coming. And maybe that’s the whole point.
Sometimes the Spirit doesn’t arrive on cue. Sometimes He slips in quietly, tucked into the unnoticed work, the missed intro cues, the invisible service. Sometimes He waits until you’re out of the holy bubble and back in the world, where things hit harder and nothing feels safe or sacred.
That squirrel didn’t die for my ministry fatigue. (Let’s be real—I’m not building a theology around roadkill.) But in the weirdest, most unexpected way, Frankincense reminded me that tenderness—grief, longing, disappointment—isn’t separate from the Spirit. It is evidence of His nearness. Not all things holy glow. Some are more raw and show up when you ugly-cry over a Squeaky McWhiskers.
So this Christmas, my takeaway is a lot of extra reverence for everyone who is also serving (and exhausted) in the background. The musicians playing through the altar call when they’d really like to do the walk themselves. The moms burning the cinnamon rolls while the family gleefully bonds in another room. The volunteers organizing the coat drive in church basements or stacking cans in a drafty food pantry. The teenagers working the drive-through on Christmas Eve to afford something nice for mom or dad, or just for gas money. The first responders who are literally shepherds keeping watch in the holiday hours and anyone who feels like they are missing their moment in service to others.
Maybe they did miss it—maybe it’s still coming. Or maybe it’s hiding in the moments they least expect.
And maybe—just maybe—the Spirit rides shotgun on the way home, too. I just wish He’d offered to take the wheel for five minutes. He definitely would have spotted Frankincense in time.