I’m home. Me and my backpack. My suitcases are not. The good news is that I didn’t die on the trip, though I almost got ran over. I also worked hard and was hard worked.
Okay, I give up. I wanted to wrote a nice long post about the trip but my body thinks it’s like 6am and I’ve been up for like 22 hours with a 4 hour nap on a plane, and 18 of those hours were traveling.
Good night.
Home is somewhere between here and there.
My friends are there, my family’s there, and I know everything and everyone. But there’s no peace, no place to rest, no… freedom there.
Here is my job, my house, my bed, my car. I can do what I want and when I want, but there’s no one to do it with. When I’ve been cooped up all day and I need to get out, there’s no one to go with, and I don’t even know what there is to do.
There life goes on without me, and here it hasn’t quite started.
/* Anyway, since this is my 100th post (yay me!), It’s going to be a little more scattered. */
Let me count up the hours of travel I’ve subjugated my body to this week…
Friday I drove 1 hour. Waited 2 hours. Flew 1 hour. Waited 2 hours. Flew 4 hours. Rode in a car 15 minutes. Total time = 10:15
Saturday and Sunday, rode to Sonora and back. Total time = 5 hours.
Monday, rode in the car for 15 minutes, waited 2 hours, flew 1 hour, waited 30 minutes, flew 1 hour, waited 2 hours, flew 3 hours, drove 1 hour. Total time = 9:45.
Tomorrow, it’s off to London for the first time in 23 year. 23 years!!! I mean, I had a passport and was in a foreign country before my best friends were born. That’s just plain crazy to me and makes me feel really old. It doesn’t matter that I was only like 3 or 4 then, I still can remember it. Like the museum, the roman baths, the pigeons, the palace, the super cool knight village thing, the tea…
Here’s a passage from a book I was reading called Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. It’s actually a quote from a made up book at the beginning of the chapter. I’m quoting a made up book in an actual book. Fakebook -> Realbook -> Blog -> Facebook. See? It all works out.
A great rabbi stands teaching in a marketplace. it happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife’s adultery and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There’s a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a speaker for the dead, has told me of two other rabbis that face the same situation. Those are the ones I’m going to tell you.)
The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. “Is there anyone here,” he says to them, “who has not desired another man’s wife, another woman’s husband?”
They murmur and say, “We all know the desire, but Rabbi, none of us have acted on it.”
The rabbi says, “Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.” He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, “Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress, then he’ll know I am his loyal servant.”
So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.
Another Rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story and says, “Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.”
The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday they think, I may be like this woman, and I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.
As soon as they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains on to the cobblestones.
“Nor am I without sin,” he says to the people, “but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will be dead, and our city with it.” So the woman dies because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.
The famous version of this story is noteworthy because is is so startling rare in our experiences. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect us such perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation, so, of course, we killed him.
This is my first post from a strange land.
I am an expat. It’s the first time I’ve tried to put how I feel down on paper, and it sums up like this:
I am here.
I am – there’s no way around it. There’s no denying that I am not far from home, far from the land that raised me up and trained me.
I am me. I am a creature of the wood. I am a creature of the mountains. I am a creature of the lakes and streams and ocean. My bones are hard as granite bones of the mounts and my muscle is the color of the clay the fleshes the hills. My nose is full of the grass, green in the spring, gold in the summer. My tongue tastes the snow and the summer scent of dried pine needles and hot evergreens. Limestone caves, marble monoliths, towering trees, waiting waters are the adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine that store my genetic make-up. But being transplanted from my natural habitat and left to fend for myself – the defenses and weapons I have mastered and engrained into me no longer seem apt.
I am here. Far from me. Far from all that is familiar, far from all that is friendly, far from all that is family. In the foreign land where the very trees are hostile. Where the deer are small and form large herds. The semaphores are on wires and are yellow, and sometimes mounted sideways. The Walmart is huge, arranged different, and doesn’t have any good carts. The hills are sad, and the trees don’t even seem to try to grow tall.
I am meant to be here. Silly, but true. It’s the little things that remind me that this is where my crazy God wants me to be. It’s a word here, or a word there from people I know hear from God. These little words, they are these tiny answer to my questions. And it seems that there is something here that I’m supposed to learn, something that I’m supposed to get, something that is further going to define who I am and who He wants me to be. And there something here that I am going to impart.
I am the only me there is. No one else is me. I have years of training. Years of being poured into. Years of sitting under people who love the Lord. Chapel in the Pines, Rivers of Life, City Ministries, Over the Edge, Rock the Nations, Mexico Trips, Redding, the SHOP, The Call, Joint Youth Trips, Leader Retreats, Rafting Trips, Late Night Talks, County Wide Worship Nights, Night Strikes, Thursday Night Worship Practice, and IHOP are the amino acids of muscles in my spirit.
I am not here to spread the gospel of Tuolumne County. Nor am I here to further the reach of Chapel in the Pines. It’s not on the SHOP’s behalf I come.
I am here for here.
I am here for now.
I am here to see what God has planned for the little Podunk town.
I am an Expat and I am here.
It’s late and I really should be sleeping in my freezing house. I’m on the couch in the living room since I no longer have a bed in this house. Or really much of anything. I’ve got that black bag over there with my clothes, a paper grocery bag with what’s left of the non-perishable and the non-frozen food I own. There’s my sleeping bag that’s keeping me from a slow peaceful death. My backpack that weighs a ton. Oh, I’ve got my ditty bag and toiletries in the bathroom and some clothes in the laundry.
I guess I no longer live here, just am visiting.
Today was good, I went to church for the first time in ages. Worship was off the hook, but I really like Pastor Dennis’ message today. It just really seemed applicable to my life. It was about the first part of Judges and how Joshua had to move from the old (under Moses) to the new (being a leader of his own). It just seemed to fit since I’m sort of in the same time of my life. Dennis’ story and lesson about the three stages of moving gave me more of an idea of what to expect when I end my time here. When I am dead, and there’s nothingness. And when I’m alive and growing in my new environment. For everyone else, it’s just the end of the year and hope for the new. For me, it’s a little bigger.
I’m am moving. Tonight’s my last night. My last night in Tuolumne County.
Andrew said that he felt this was a time for growth – not the normal “time for growth” where you’re being stretched with extreme circumstances, but more of the growth of when spring comes and the grasses pop up, and the new shoots come off the branches, and there’s new life all around.
But like any seed, I must first die before I can grow.
I’ve said my good byes. I’ve fought back tears hugging in the foyer of the church. I’ve felt that sicking feeling when I’ve thought of life without my friend while I was on stage listening to conversations. I’ve had the hope of old relationships in new ways with when I won’t see them face to face possibly ever again. I’m going to have weeks nights and weekends with nothing to do, no one to spend them with. No more adventures with people I can count on to send for help if the cave collapses, no one to push me to do things I normally wouldn’t, no one to make me laugh and think is crazy just with the stupid things he does.
And then tomorrow I have to say good-bye to Lindsey.
I’m not sure this one has sunk in yet, since we’ve been having semi-long distance relationship already. But getting a Lindsey fix isn’t going to be as easy or as cheap as driving two hours away to Tracy to have a date night.
I’m hoping that I have grace and the strength to survive.
I’m going to miss you all.