He looked down as he walked. His footfalls did not make crunching noises across the dry forest floor as they did in July. The ground, now moist and soft, gave way silently to the indentation of his boots; dew still gathered on the patches of grass throughout the forest. He stopped to examine the tip of a pine branch, its rough green needles holding back droplets of water, clinging to them till the very last moment, then suddenly releasing them—one tiny, shimmering, liquid crystal at a time—to fall noiselessly to the ground.

“Oh, Lord,” he sighed over and over as he walked, “what is it you have to tell me?”

He had been here before many times. He could always sense when something was being spoken to the inner ear of his spirit, though he could not always immediately discern what the message was. The voice that called to men like Heinrich von Dortmann was not a voice most mortals could hear. He had been tuning his heart to descry its peculiarly quiet, divine timbre for thirty or more years, and still the indications were sometimes so faint as to require much prayer and numerous lonely walks and many mornings of solitude before clarity was obtained. But until that translucence of supernatural vision came to him, he would make no move within the motions of his own flesh. He would go about his work as any working man must go. What had been given him to do, he would do with energy and faithfulness. Where he had not yet been given direction, he would wait.

No one would look upon his face and hear the rippling of the subterranean streams that flowed within him, bringing the essential elements of life with daily renewing into his soul, and carrying those same ingredients from his innermost being out and into the lives of those around him. Only his wife and daughter fully knew what manner of man this was who lived with them, provided for them, protected them, and helped bring out of them the full maturing of their own beings. Visible or not, his was a life lived on an altogether distinctive plane from his contemporaries of society. Truly he was a citizen of another kingdom.

“What did you want to show me, Father?” he breathed softly as he walked. “What do you have for me to do… what is it you want me to see… why did you awaken me… what are you trying to speak… help me to hear your voice….”

His prayers became once again inaudible, mingling with his own thoughts.