I feel good.

Even after sixteen straight hours in the car, with pouring rain and enough cups of coffee to make a stomach lining disappear--I feel good.

This morning I sat on the couch in my pajamas and listened to the house wake up. We sat around the table laughing harder than is recommended for people on as little sleep as we've all had recently. We ate homemade bread and soup for lunch. I sat at the piano and he sat on the couch, helping me figure out the timing to a song I've been trying to remember. I just laid on the floor playing with a baby I love and talking with a mother I'm going to miss even more than I already do. Sounds and photos of Christian Fellowship Academy's spring musical are everywhere--I can't wait to see it tonight! We talked about presbytery and moving and family and friends and all that in only an hour.

I feel good. I feel happy. I feel home.
This promises to be a good week.

This has been a week of reminders. Days checked off on a mental calendar, emails and voicemails to remind me that others haven’t forgotten (so how could I?). It isn’t that I’ve forgotten, though, you see, it’s that this week has been a week of reminders about other things too.

In January I was learning about rebuilding, tearing things down and building them back up again. Dusting off the old and trusting there was still some use for scraps somewhere. I didn’t learn, however, that sometimes some things are meant to be torn down and not rebuilt.

Sometimes people die, things stop working, relationships sputter to a halt, and cities are left behind. Sometimes we just have to trust that a time to tear down and a time to build up don’t have to be consecutive or simultaneous. Sometimes things fall apart and the only resolution left is to face resolutely forward, “forgetting what lies behind and pressing toward the mark.”

I was rebuked soundly earlier this week. It's not an unfamiliar rebuke, but the sort that grinds my innards every time I hear it—mostly because it's true, but partly because how dare they see into my soul so clearly? “This, all of this world stuff, isn’t your home. Being nostalgic about it won’t take you further and it won’t help you to trust the Lord if you’re always trying to go back to the last place where you felt safe. You need to let go of your grip and trust Him.”

I seethed inwardly, said I didn’t want to talk anymore, and went inside.

Because he was right. Because everyone who has ever said that to me was right. And everyone is a lot of people.

The verses aren’t unfamiliar, which is why they are the first ones on my heart as my tears mingle with the hot shower water and soap:

How blessed is the man whose strength is in You, and whose heart is set on
pilgrimage to Zion. Psalm 84.5

And indeed if they had been thinking of that country from which they went out
they would have had opportunity to return. But as it was they desired a better
country, a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to call them His own. Hebrews 11.15,16

And I thought of forty years in the wilderness, because I’m not going to lie, the silence on this website is a direct reflection of the silence I feel around me—this desert season. I thought of the Israelites who, having been delivered from the hand of oppression and slavery, felt it their duty to beg to go back to Egypt to die.

“The sons of Israel said to them, ‘Would that we had died by the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full: for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly.”

They wanted to return to the best thing they knew, even though it would lead to death—even though they knew it couldn’t compare to milk and honey and promise, because they didn’t remember the promise of better things, of Zion. They had forgotten that there are some places to which they are not to return and some things that are not meant to be fixed. Some things are not intended for resurrection and some cities are better left behind.

This means that things might not every look the same again: people have died, yes they have died; families have fallen, humanity falters, and relationships die; Egypt is plighted and Potsdam is changed; friends become lovers and lovers marry, babies are born and we stand and we say goodbye on every street in every city.

But we never hope that things go back to the way they used to be, because used to be means used—and we are setting our hearts on new. Looking behind and celebrating anniversaries of sadness and death and the past only handicap us from expectation and promise. It is a time to build, not rebuild—Build new.

I know. I've been feeling it too. I'm sure you don't feel it as often as I do, after all, you're all there and I'm the only one here. But I've been feeling the distance--with every phone call, with every email, with every read through the weblog posts of you whom I love, but you whom I feel further from every day.

It's the cost of being all here I guess.

It's that startling realization that when we talk about lengthening our lease, signing up for Children's Ministry at my local church, knowing that only six weeks remain until my diploma is in hand, and the place I am searching for employment is here--it's that realization that jolts me and draws me back to the deep down familiar. To the phone, the Internet, the emails, the orange package slips in my mailbox announcing that someone at home loves me and thought of me. Anything, anywhere, just to remind myself that if I pinch myself and wake up and this place suddenly isn't home anymore, there is still a home somewhere else.

But life isn't meant to be lived like that.
And it's sad to me.

Because I want to defend myself, this transition, you see, assure you that I'll be home, involved, that things will go back to the way they used to be. But they can't. Because they're married now, and them too. They have a baby and they live in a different house. And he isn't around anymore and she isn't really either. That family moved far away and she moved back home. And she moved in. And she's pregnant, and so it she, finally. He asked her to marry him, and she said yes. And I moved away. To here. Cleveland, Tennessee.

All the changes that keep life from being a circular abyss; aren't you glad?

I know. I've been feeling it too. With every phone call. Every email. Every orange package slip in my mailbox. Every birthday missed. And every baby shower skipped. With each mention of traditions that I'm missing and with every photo viewed repeatedly.

But I've also been feeling something new. With every walk into our peaceful home. With every dinner around the multiple tables of our makeshift family. With every glimpse of sprouting seeds in our garden. Every wedding attended. Every hug received. Every bit of love given.

Learning that here, at last, I am home.