So here I am, week 33- nearly halfway through my 70 weeks- writing from back home in the Midwest (“Home.” I don’t know what that word means. But more on that later). Weeks when I’m home are very impactual in this project in prayer because they are often very clarifying, meaningful, soul-shocking, painful, beautiful, beautifully painful, painfully beautiful. God often gives me some answers and revelations about the next phase of my life. I think weeks home are so meaningful because as I’ve said before, I feel called back here. So going home I pray and think and feel my way around, feeling the place out again as if, by leaving the state for a while, someone has turned the lights off and I need to feel my way around to know what my house is like and how to move from room to room. And so, I go about feeling about the Midwest- trying it on to see if it still fits. Maybe I gained some emotional or personality-based weight out on the East Coast and I can’t fit into the Midwest anymore. More like, maybe I lost a few pounds of soul or made myself thinner to fit between the thin trees, slide through the New England forests and now the wide open Midwestern fields will feel too big and baggy on me. Maybe I’ll have lost something or gained something and just look ridiculous here to the people I know and love. So every time I go home I look around, pray, see if this truly is the place I’m called to go. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that I love it or that I fit in it, interestingly enough. But those two things would be helpful or at least, make things easier even though I’d do without them if I were asked to.
Going home- I never know what that means. I call the place where I usually sleep “home.” I called my dorm room home, I call my apartment home- and yet when I say I’m “going home” for vacation, everyone knows I mean the Chicago Suburb where I grew up. In a way, my apartment out east is more home than my Chicago home but the East Coast is not my home- the Midwest is more my home. Really, I don’t know if there will be a place (this side of eternity and short of heaven) that will truly feel like home. But I do desperately want to find a place on this earth that I can call home moreso than I can call any place home now. I want to find somewhere where I’m supposed to be and supposed to stay for a while. Maybe that place is a location, a place of work, a person- maybe a combination (which would be nice), although I often fear I may never have any of those things in a way where one feels like my “home.” In a way, where I work now is more home than anything else- a place where I feel close and connected with all my students and co-workers and where I spend so much time- I even sleep there every once in a great while. Aside from a home with God- I don’t know what “home” means but I think whenever I go “home” to Chicago as of late, I find myself looking for a home in it. Looking for a home your own home- the place where you grow up. Heh. What a sorrowfully interesting notion.
So anyway, I went on another trip home- looking for home. Needless to say, I started out this trip a little worse for the wear. Tired, snappy, exhausted with my life situations and daily tasks- despite how I love the people in my daily tasks dearly and would do anything for them- time makes things more exasperating, pushes us to our breaking points. I came “home” to a horrific mess, rooms full of remnants of dead relatives and all the messes I had left here just by living the past 24 years, to a mother so broken down by illness I barely recognized her, and thus a future of painful decisions and situations- and thus a lot of decisions about my future made for me- unfolding before my eyes. I thought of all the things I want in life for myself that I fear I’ll never have and had the pain of losses of intimacy with others as times and friendships change hanging over my head. And all along, I think, “I’m called back here?! I don’t know if I can do it.” Sometimes thinking that terrible and ridiculous thought, “when am I going to live for me?” to which the answer in my heart of hearts is always, “never. I’ll always be living for God- who will give me more than I could ever ask for or attempt to gain in ‘living for me’ and even if He didn’t, He’s already done more than enough for me to owe him my lifetime- even though because He is so good, I owe nothing and could never pay Him back if I tried anyway. But that whole interestingly circular set of debt and forgiveness and love, if you understand it well enough, makes it impossible not to give your life out of love and gratitude to God.
But I digress, I came here broken and somewhat hopeless in a few respects. I prayed for strength and clarity- that God keep me strong in all I had to do on this trip- confronting the situations with my mother, situations with my friends, and sins in my own life- making sure that an idol has not returned to my heart.
And I found myself on an open road underneath the big Midwestern sky- I could see so far, much further than New England forests allow. The tall grasses were waving to me in the sun and I could see the ground, although everything glimmered as if covered in glass as the ice that coated everything shone in the sun. My favorite Christian radio station that I haven’t listened to in months played songs that I associate with so many good memories from when I student taught in the public schools back in Wisconsin, and I couldn’t help but smile. I felt free- free from the burdens of my sin for God was with me, reminding me how he’d forgiven them all and even brought me up so I could keep myself from committing them further. Free from winter’s weight- the sun was shining, I didn’t need my heavy coat. Free from feeling enclosed- the wide open road, the wide open spaces, the light was just right and there were not trees or clouds to hide me from it. There is nowhere to hide from the light of God in a wide open field. The Midwest still fit- still felt like home- I don’t know what that is- but I think if anything feels like it, it’s someplace beneath the Midwestern skies.
God rode with me, was so present- in the sunshine, the open fields, in old pictures of my family, in an old journal my grandmother wrote on her road trip to California when she, like me, was 24. In her incredibly poetic words about how her experiences with nature convicted her that there was a God. In all the things about my mother and Grandmother that I see in myself, in my close friendships stay strong no matter the time or distance, in the poetic words and stories of my friends and family, in the precious conversations I have with my mother, in the softness of my 11 year old puppy’s fur.
God, life is just so beautiful even when it seems it’s at its darkest. And I’m not taking the Lord’s name in vain there.
I often see the beauty in the world, but today I could see just how clearly all of it- ALL of it- not just the nature part (which is easier to see than the human/relationship part sometimes) was God.
I came here from a world still pretty much frozen in white and found despite the huge snow storms here, the snow had thawed thoroughly and I could see the ground. I even flew out of an overcast snow covered Boston and, even though I landed in a dreary overcast Chicago, for a few blissful hours, I took a nap in the sunshine. I had a whole row of seats to myself in the back of the plane and laid down on my back, letting the sun stream in through the window. High above the clouds that keep me from His light, I was flying now in it. Listening to a folk artist I’ve recently fallen in love with named Daisy May as she sang,
“Oh sun,
how do you do it all the time?
You take the weight off me,
take it on and you still shine.
Oh, when it rains and all the greys
come over me,
I know you remain the same
even though I cannot see you, Sun.
So do you think you could
shine a little bit for me today,
oh if you’ve got time while you’re ridin’ along
that big old skyway,
Do you think you could
shine a little bit more so I can see
and maybe someday sun, oh you’ll see me.
Oh Sun,
How do you do it all the time?
Keepin’ me warm
When I’m cold, as cold as ice.
Oh, even in the night
You still shine
When it snows and everything blows
Out the door
Oh, I know you’ll stay the same forever more
For you are the sun…”
I like to think of the sun as The Son. And I think Daisy may mean that, too. And oh, Son, I don’t know how you do it all the time because when I try I just grow weary, and cold as ice. But You keep me warm, You restore my soul, so would you shine a little bit more for me today?
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