Trisha is just a nine year old girl going on a hike with her mom and older brother, but when she wanders off the path her whole world changes. Throughout the next nine days, she struggles to hold on to her sanity and hope of surviving the perils of the deep woods of Maine. There are times in those woods when Trisha beings to question if there is anything or anyone who can help her. Is it predetermined for her to get out the woods? Or does her free will to survive carry her through?
"She had learned to stay on the path. No matter what you had to do or how bad you had to do it, no matter how much yataa-yataa you had to listen to, it was better to stay on the path . . . On the path you were safe."At this point, Trisha is starting to accept the fact that she's lost. She should of stayed on the path. She shouldn't of veered off on her own. The path was laid out before her, all she had to do was follow it. Now she was wondering alone, lost and afraid. Her free will deceived her - it was evil and had gotten her lost.
". . . What if she had asked because some deep future-seeing part of her had known that this was going to happen? Had known, had decided she was going to need a little God to get through . . ."Thinking back to a conversation she had with her dad, Trisha tries to reason whether there is a God or not. What had made her bring that question up so long ago? Was it predetermined that this event would happen, and that some part of her, or someone controlling her future, knew that she would need this reassurance once the moment came? Why did she need the reassurance of God? Was He real and therefore trying to direct her to Him? Or was it simply that He was all she had ever heard about? She did tend to say "oh, God" a lot. Was this out of habit that she picked up from those around her? Or did she somehow have the knowledge of the word "God" already inside her?
"Pree-cisely, sugar, subaudible. I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die - I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created - but I believe there has to be something . . . There's something that keeps most of us from dying in our sleep. No prefect loving all-seeing God, I don't think the evidence supports that, but a force."I love this description Trisha's dad gives her when asked what he believes. I feel like I fall into this category sometimes, my free will shining proudly. It's hard to describe this "force" that a lot of people feel. Is it a being? Is it mother nature? Is it the Universe and all its unknown splendor? I don't know, I don't think anyone does. This "force", however, seems more reputable than a "God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created". Like I've pointed out previous posts: why give us free will if only to punish us for using it? Why "lovingly" create us in His image and then torture us when we veer off the path? Plus, if God is all-seeing then why doesn't He notice these "imperfections" in the plot and change them before we make a mess of everything? If God was with Trisha, why did He not send a thought, a sign, anything to make her turn around and stay on the path?
"Trisha looked across the stream at them, a little startled but not really afraid, not then. Two of the robes were white. The one worn by the figure in the middle was black . . . 'I come from the God of Tom Gordon,' he said. 'The one he points to when he gets the save' . . . 'Actually, I am the Subaudible,' the man who looked like her father said apologetically . . . 'I come from the God of the Lost. It has been watching you. It has been waiting for you.'"This part of Trisha's journey intrigued me. After drinking water from the stream and eating a mixture of berries and nuts, Trisha sits down and observes some butterflies in a clearing. As her mind begins to fade, the butterflies turned into robed figures, two white and one black. She's not afraid, just curious - which is strange because I would of been dying. The first white figure tells her that he is from the God of Tom Gordon, the one she asks her dad about. He tells Trisha that God is very busy with a earthquake in Japan and, therefore, has no time to help her. The second white figure, who is in the form of her dad, tells Trisha that he is the Subaudible, the force that guides us. He also tells her that he is unable to help her. Once the black figure steps forward Trisha becomes afraid. He tells her that he serves the God of the Lost, the one who has been stalking her in the woods. He is nothing but wasps and bugs, and looks like death.
To me, these three figures represent God, the Force, and Fear. Fear is the most controlling emotion we possess - it influences our thoughts and actions, making us irrational. When we focus on fear, fear is all there is. But we have the free will to overcome this fear. We can choose to run from it, allowing it to control our lives, or we can choose to stand tall and face it. In Trisha's case, she allowed fear to control her until she came across the gate posts in the meadow. It was fear that made her run farther into the woods in the beginning, and it was fear that kept her from crossing the lake that would of gotten her to safety four days earlier. Once she found the gate posts, however, she began to have hope. This hope revived her free will to survive, and by this point she was becoming less afraid. In the end, her free will chose to stand up to her demons instead of running - she was fully in control, even for just a brief moment. But was this all really free will? Or did God lend her the strength and implant the desire at the very end when she needed it the most? Was He really with her the whole time, keeping her demons at bay (seeing as the "bear" was following her the entire time and never attacked or showed itself once)? Maybe God really works like Tom Gordon says:
"[it's His nature] to come on in the bottom of the ninth inning."
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