Humble Roots
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Hello, my name is Hannah and I need help.
There I said it.
The woman who happily assumes responsibility after responsibility. The woman who loves doing it all. The woman who stays up late and gets up early worrying about how she's going to get it all done. The woman who so prided herself in her usefulness that God decided she needed to write a book about humility.
This woman has finally reached a place where she can ask for help.
On October 4th, my second book Humble Rootswill release to the general public. But between now and then, I need a group of folks who are willing to read it and tell others about it. I need a group of folks who can help amplify the message of finding peace through humility.
If you're anything like me, you're probably up to your neck in good work--family, church, community service. But if you're anything like me, you're also probably exhausted. Worn thin by the sheer weight of trying to do more and be more than God intends for you.
In Matthew 11, Jesus invites people like us to find rest in Him. "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened" He calls, "and I will give you rest."
But this rest doesn't come by throwing off good things, having tighter schedules, or simply learning to say "No." This rest comes through humility. It comes by learning limitation and dependence.
"Take my yoke upon you and learn from me," Jesus continues, "for I am gentle and humblein heart. And you will find rest for your souls."
Too often, the desire to do good work can mask a deeper pride. We busy ourselves with good things, not simply to fill the need, but because we need to be needed. We need to know that we are important, to know that our lives matter. And so to quiet our fears and stroke our egos, we try to save everyone and everybody from everything.
But we are not God. And when we try to be, we end up stretched, worn thin. While we're busy saving the world, we're losing our own souls.
So let me say it once again: I need your help.
In the past, I might have tried to launch a book on my own. To do enough work behind the scenes to make up the difference of having to humble myself and ask for help. But today, I know better.
If you'd be willing to receive an advance copy of Humble Roots, read it, and commit to to sharing it over the next few weeks, please go to this form. There, you will find more details about how you can help. More than anything though, I want you to join me on this journey to rest, to walking the path of humility.
I want you to come with me, through field and forest, to discover how the natural world declares the glory of God and reminds us of our limitations. I want you to learn how honey and blackberries and wild grapes teach us dependence. I want you to believe that the One who cares for the lilies of the field will care for you too. I want you to know the peace of wild things.
So will you come? Will you join me?
Hillbilly Elegy
Many of you know that I live in the mountains of western Virginia. We're hardworking bunch, knit together by family, shared sense of community, and a particular love for this region. Here, my kids go to local schools, and my husband pastors a small church at a bend of a long country road. A graveyard sits on the right and a cow pasture on the left. A small stream runs through the pasture and is home to minnows, tadpoles, lizards, and crawdads.
But not everything is idyllic. Like many other communities, we're increasingly affected by income disparity, drug use, & the breakdown of the nuclear family, Travel just a bit farther west and you'll hit the coal fields of southern WV and eastern KY. The challenges these folks face make ours seem like child's play. It's hard to understand the challenges of rural life because outsiders tend to idealize it (Mayberry) or mock it (Beverly Hillbillies). What we don't do is take a careful look at the complexities of it.
In the recently released, Hillbilly Elegy, author J.D. Vance chronicles the story of "his people"--from growing up an Ohio factory town to returning to his ancestral home in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Vance's childhood was marked by family chaos and underachievement. It was a childhood and family that he loves deeply nonetheless. But Vance doesn't mince words: he honors the humanity of these self-described "hillbillies" at the same time he calls them to own their potential.
One of the most enlightening aspects of the book is Vance's take on how religion plays out in working class communities. There's often a deep-seated sense of faith or belief in God, but for the most part, the rural poor are detached from local churches. Vance wonders out loud how much this is their own fault and how much it is the fault of church. I've wondered the same thing myself. Many times.
Are our church's even accessible to folks outside a certain demographic? And if they aren't, how can we change that?
Here's my longer review of the book and a podcast in which I argue that it will be among the most influential books of 2016.
Frost Date
It's finally spring in our hills. Officially, it's been spring for over a month, but an Appalachian spring is not a spring you can trust, especially if you are a gardener. The mountains tease and tempt you, blossoming one moment and freezing the next. That's why "frost date" is so important. This is "the day of the year, based on these 30 year averages, that there is only a 10% chance that there will be a frost." Statistically speaking, this means that you should be safe to plant after this day. For us, it tends to fall at the end of April.
But every year, I watch grown men and women tempt this "frost date." For people staunchly opposed to all forms of gambling and avarice, the gardeners I know have a particular penchant toward risk. If you put out your seedlings early enough, and the weather holds, you might also be the first to put out home-grown tomatoes at a church supper. But if you presume too much upon spring, and put them out too soon, your tomatoes won't show up until August because you'll have to replant them after they die. (Of course, you could always do what one friend of our does--tend your plants in a greenhouse until they're nearly grown and then put them out already in bloom--but for the most part, this kind of behavior is frowned upon.)
I spent my childhood watching my father worry and wait until the frost date had finally passed. Today I watch my husband do the same; in fact, as I type, he is out in his garden finally putting out his broccoli and cabbages and tomatoes. He hasn't been this happy in months. Last year, I wrote a short poem about this angst-ridden season and remembered it just today--a day far enough past frost date to ensure that we will have tomatoes come July.
Frost Date
Spring comes to these hills on lilting steps of two forward, one back. The man who has known eighty lifts his hat and smooths down wisps of white. “You cannot trust these days; they’re as fickle as a woman.” But these days seduce old men (and young too) to sow their seeds of hope– a hope that is less than confidence– lest April make fools of them all.
Can Do: Rural Traditions, Food, and Life Full Circle
One of the scariest places of my childhood was my grandma's basement. It was dark, damp, and prone to flooding. Sometimes water would pool inches deep making half of it completely inaccessible. A musty smell hung in the air, the combination of damp stone, old household chemicals, and the outdated magazines piled high in the corner. It was both alluring and terrifying.
But the basement was also where my Grandma stored her canned goods--rows of jars lined the wooden shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling. Beets, pears, green beans, tomatoes, lime pickles, grape juice, blackberry jelly, and applesauce. All waiting patiently in the damp darkness until we'd venture down the nearly vertical steps to retrieve them.
Today, my family's canned goods sit on shelves in our basement, too; and yet, I have to admit that our basement can't compete with Grandma's. Good lighting and a sump pump have stolen all the mystery out of it. And for us, canning is less a necessity and more a choice--a way of life that allows us to tap into our rural roots and live close to the land. For grandma, though, canning was about survival, about preserving summer's bounty for the dark, scarce days of winter.
I had a chance to reflect on this (and other things) in this piece at Her.meneutics: "When Rural Traditions Get Hipster Cred." I also got to reminisce a bit more with John Hall and Kathy Emmons on the John & Kathy Show on 101.5 WORD-FM out of Pittsburgh. https://soundcloud.com/john-and-kathy/tuesday-october-28-2014 (Our conversation starts at 14:35.)
In many ways, this piece and the subsequent conversation brought me full circle. I grew up about an hour south of Pittsburgh in the Laurel Highlands, which is part of the greater Appalachian region. So it's funny to me that a piece about canning and rural living would snag me a spot on a radio station out the "big city." But I suppose that's the way life often works. You spend years trying to find yourself only to discover that you've always known who you were--and for me, that means being a country girl whose canned goods sit on shelves in the basement just like grandma's did.
Faithful in Much
Two years ago, our family moved back to the rolling hills of southwest Virginia. My husband had been raised here, and even though we had literally traveled the world, he never could quite escape them. I grew up 300 miles north but have found that there is something very familiar about this area. The small communities. The strong sense of place. And family roots that run as deep as the white oaks’. Still, I’ve had a lot to learn in the last two years, to learn the stories that make this place what it is. Most recently, I’ve been learning about the unique price that southwest Virginia paid during World War II.
You may have heard of Bedford, VA, a small farming community that sits in the county next to us. When American troops stormed Omaha Beach on a cloud-covered June 6, 1944, many of Bedford’s own sons were among the first out of the boats. The first to be mowed down by German guns. But these “Bedford Boys” hadn’t signed up to be heroes. They were farm boys who had joined a local National Guard unit, simply looking for work. When WWII came, they shipped off to England and eventually found themselves part of the Normandy Campaign. Of the 28 who landed on the beach, only 6 survived. Today, Bedford is home to the National D-Day Memorial that commemorates the sacrifice of so many others like them.
But Bedford is not alone.Thirty miles to the west, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge just outside of Roanoke is a little community that my family now calls home. According to the sign that greets you on Rt. 116, it’s Mt. Pleasant; but we don’t have a post office to prove it. We do have our own elementary school, a fire department, and a Rec Club. And we do have churches—Methodist, Brethren, and several varieties of Baptist.
If you turn west off Rt. 116, you’ll find a road that meanders away from the community’s center, rising and falling with the contours of the hills. It passes horse pastures, dilapidated barns, and neat brick homes built on family land. Travel this road far enough, and you’ll come to a small country church that was first named “Brook Hill Community Church.” True to her name, she’s flanked on her left by a brook, flowing through a cow pasture. On her right is a cemetery.
This is the church that my husband pastors, the one that brought us back to southwest Virginia.
If you walk through her front doors and up the steps to the vestibule, you won’t see anything much different from any other country church. A coat rack. A table stacked with Sunday’s bulletins. The doors that lead to the sanctuary. But if you’ve an eye for detail, you might notice an unassuming plaque that hangs on the wall opposite the water fountain. It is roughly two feet by three and holds the names of over fifty men. For the last two years, I’ve walked past it on my way to the choir loft, stood by it while waiting for the ladies room, and occasionally paused to read it with no understanding of its significance. Finally, one Sunday, I pulled a long-time member aside and asked her why it was there. She couldn’t remember exactly and we both agreed that we needed to find out before it was lost from our church’s collective memory.
Come Monday, I’d already forgotten.
But then, Tuesday night, the night of our women’s Bible study, another long-time member walked up to me and handed me a piece of folded paper. The front was emblazoned with a large patriotic crest and underneath it were the words “Unveiling of Plaque.” It was dated August 15, 1943 and the inside listed two columns of names—the same names that hung on the wall.
And then I understood.These were the “Brook Hill Boys.” Fathers, sons, uncles, brothers. Men from our little church and community who had left the familiarity of these mountains to wage war in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. Realizing what it was, several of us formed an impromptu gathering around the plaque. And as we did, the memories came flooding back. One by one, they began pointing to names.
“This here was Brenda’s daddy.”
“And that’s Nadine’s brother.”
“There’s my uncle.”
“I don’t know this one—do you?”
And then someone pointed to a name with a gold star next to it.
“His ship was blown up.”
We fell silent, no one quite knowing what to say. Not simply because this one name had a gold star, but because so many others did as well. Because there it was: a story of life and death, of courage and sacrifice, of love and commitment—all represented by a single, unassuming, gold star next to a name on a plaque in a small Virginia church.
I don’t know if any of those men were on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 with the Bedford Boys, but I do know that they were the same kind of men. They are the same kind of men who live in this community today. They are quiet, unassuming men. They are men who hunt and farm and work. They are men who’d rather be home in these mountains with the women they love than anywhere else in the world.
But they are also men who, having learned to be faithful in little things, became faithful in so much more.
"A Heaven in a Wild Flower:" Discipling Children through Awe
It was one of those moments when I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So I opted to just shrink lower into our second-row pew, stifle my giggles, and hold my seven year-old son close, thanking God for him and all his glorious honesty.
If you are a regular reader, you know that my husband pastors a rural church; and while we do our best to keep our kids out of the fishbowl, we do expect them to participate in the full-scope of congregational life. Including our mid-week service. This isn’t usually a problem, but like all of us, there are those days when they’d rather stay home. Perhaps they're tired, busy doing other things, or in the case of my seven-year-old son, simply find Legos more interesting than having to sit still for an hour.
On this particular Wednesday night, we had dealt with the standard objections over dinner, and by 7:05, everyone was safely ensconced in our normal pew with our heads bowed as one of the deacons opened the service with prayer as only a deacon from a rural Baptist church can. About half way through, he asked God to touch the hearts of “those who could have come tonight but chose not to.”
Not missing a beat, my son piped up, “Well, I didn’t want to come, but I HAD to.”
To be fair, my son’s resistance to church is not the only discipleship hurdle we face with our children. It is easily matched by his older sister’s recent acknowledgment that she finds God's eternality “weird” and the fact that their little brother regularly asks to pray at meal time for the sole purpose of being able to control the length of the prayer. (“Dear-God-Thank-you-for-this-food-help-us-to love-each-other-Amen.”) If success is measured by religious conformity, we’re batting 0 for 3 here.
Still, these kinds of situations have the potential to worry Christian parents who desire to pass faith on to their children. With the reports of widespread Millennial angst and stories of even apologists’ daughters rejecting Christianity, it easy to lose heart. And when we do, it’s even easier to respond by simply doubling our efforts to force faith into them through more catechism, more Bible memory, more “church.”
We do this because we are conditioned to think that discipleship is primarily the accumulation of religious knowledge. A quick Google search for “children’s discipleship” brings back resource after resource—everything from catechisms to Bible memory systems to pint-sized devotional books--all promising to produce the next generation of believers. What I rarely hear discussed is the necessity of discipling our children through “natural revelation.” When theologians use the term “natural revelation,” they are referring to what God has revealed about Himself through the world around us. “Specific revelation,” on the other hand, is what God has revealed about Himself through the Scripture—and what is often the mainstay of our efforts to instill faith in the hearts of our children.
And while I believe Scripture is essential to the process of belief, Scripture was never intended to be engaged in a vacuum. Instead, faith happens as the Holy Spirit impresses the truth of God’s Word (specific revelation) onto a heart that has been primed to accept it by experiencing the truth of God in the world around it (natural revelation). Like a pair of chopsticks, the two must work together.
The Apostle Paul understood this and it’s precisely why in Acts 17—that famous Mars Hill sermon—he begins by appealing to what the Athenians already know through their experience of the world. They already believed in some “unknown God” because they could see His works both in them and around them. So too, most of us already understand the importance of this approach in evangelism; we craft winsome arguments and appeal to the nature of the cosmos and the intrinsic code of right and wrong that seems to be written on every human heart. What fewer of us understand is that we must evangelize our children this exact same way. We must disciple our children through wonder as much as through catechism. In Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton, that great British philosopher of the last century, writes that he gained his understanding of the world as a child:
“My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery… a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by mere facts.” It is this “certain way of looking at life” that many Christian parents neglect—or perhaps have never even acquired for themselves. We are not merely stuffing our children’s heads with facts; we are shaping hearts to believe that certain realities are true. So that when they do finally encounter the facts of faith, they will already have hearts that can recognize them. When they finally memorize “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” it will find lodging because they have already gazed up into this same heaven and marveled at its brilliant stars; they have already let the sand from this same earth slip through their chubby fingers and work its way into every nook and cranny of their tiny bodies.
So that in the end, they don’t believe there is a Creator simply because Genesis 1 tells them so; they believe there is a Creator because they have seen His Creation. As you go about discipling your children, as you teach them their Bible verses and correct them when they disobey, do not neglect the sacred discipline of awe and wonder at God’s creation. Take them to the mountains to walk forest trails in search of the millipedes and butterflies that are the works of His hands. Take them to the seashore to be knocked over by the power of a wave so that one day they’ll know how to be knocked over by the power of God. Take them to the art museum to thrill at the colors, shapes, and textures whose beauty can only be explained by the One who is Beauty Himself. Take them to the cities to crane their necks to the see the tops of sky scrapers and shiver with anticipation at God’s miracle of physics that keeps them from tumbling down.
And then take them to Church.
Take them to Church to bow their heads and receive the Word that gives them the ability to know the God behind all these wonders personally. Take them to Church to let the joy of their little hearts overflow in worship of the One through whom all these things consist. And take them to Church, so that in the midst of other worshipers, in the midst of other image bearers, they too will eventually be able to find their place in the great, wide world He has made.
Appalachian Spring
If you’ve never heard Appalachian Spring, I must caution you that your humanity may not yet be fully realized. It’s not that this particular piece of music is an essential part of the process of sanctification, but it is one of the clearest expressions of common grace that I’ve yet to encounter. Originally composed as a ballet, the score tells the story of a newly married couple on the Appalachian frontier who face their future with courage and determination. I first heard it from my father’s record player as a child, and growing up in those same hills, it was impossible that the music would not etch itself on my soul.
Spring in Appalachia is a strange mix of hope and persistence. The dark, dreary days of winter do not go easily; they die off slowly--as my mother described it recently—like a Shakespearean hero. But steadily, the mud and slog and slosh is replaced by bits of green and yellow. The crocuses and forsythia bloom and the hills begin to color, budding in the same gentle hues that will eventually consume them six months later. And finally, finally, you know spring has come when you hear the faint, sweet mating calls of the tree frogs that we call simply “spring peepers.” Clustered around lakes and streams, these little frogs sing to their loves, their warbles and chirrups echoing the hope and anticipation that the rest of us feel.
I attended university in South Carolina, and during the spring of my sophomore year, I found myself feeling particularly homesick. For this northern girl, this thing that they called “spring” would have been more accurately described as one head-long plunge directly into summer. I wandered around campus in a funk—not even really knowing or understanding what was wrong. Then one day, I found a package in my campus mail box. Inside was a cassette tape from my father. He had taken a trip to the lake about two miles from our house and recorded the spring peepers.
I cried.
My roommates figured I was nuts; and when I told my friends about it, they thought that “spring peepers” where baby chicks. Their responses simply deepened my sense of alienation. Here I was, a country girl in the big city surrounded by people who had never heard Appalachian Spring and didn’t have the slightest concept of the significance of spring peepers.
Until one evening. A boy that I had been getting to know over the last several weeks had asked me to dinner and afterwards, we were walking to the library where I worked. As is the case when you don’t know someone well, the conversation quickly turned to the weather. It was springtime after all, and despite the inadequacies of one lived in South Carolina, you can always talk about spring.
“You know what I miss most,” I ventured, carefully putting forward a test to determine whether or not this fellow was worth further consideration. “I miss spring peepers. My dad sent me a recording of them and I’ve been listening to it constantly.”
“Oh I know what you mean,” he answered, this slightly-awkward religion major who dressed in mismatched hand-me-downs but who had those interesting brown eyes and auburn hair, “I miss them too—especially right about this time of night when they’re just coming out.”
My heart stopped. “So you know that they’re not baby chicks?”
“Of course not, who’d be so dumb to think they were?”
Most of the time, we expect God’s providence to reveal itself with the audacity of a Las Vegas neon sign. We expect Him to shout His will from the mountaintops when in reality, most of the time, He simply whispers it. It doesn’t unfurl so much as unfold in a gentle, persistent way.
Because as much as I loved growing up in Appalachia, I never really expected to stay here. At five, I planned to be a missionary nurse in the jungles of Africa, living in a hut, eating flying insects, and standing up to angry chieftains. At fifteen, my dreams morphed to living beside the sea (in no less than a lighthouse) and running an orphanage for middle school boys. Never once did I anticipate becoming a pastor’s wife in a rural context similar to the one I had grown up in.
Never once did I anticipate that I’d marry a boy because he knew what spring peepers were.
But this is how our God works. He uses all things—all the things that we consider inconsequential, all the things that we chafe at—to orchestrate His plan for our lives. And the wonder of it all is that He sovereignly guides both Nature and Nurture to make us precisely who we are supposed to be.
A couple of weeks ago, I was driving home in my husband’s pick-up after our mid-week prayer service. He had already taken our three little ones home because I needed to stay to practice in a women’s trio that was slated to sing the following Sunday. By the time I left, it was already dark and the ground was damp with that persistent Appalachian mist that hovers and crawls on little cat feet. As I approached a narrow bridge that straddles a creek, I slowed and rolled down my windows. And there they were. Those spring peepers singing their love song, singing their love song of spring in Appalachia.
And I knew that all was as it should be. All was right in the world. I knew I was precisely where God had always planned for me to be.
As We Are Known
http://www.motherearthnews.com
There’s something about small towns and small churches. They offer us a sense of security--the security of being known, of not having to lay out the pieces of who you are, of knowingly exactly where you fit in the puzzle of human relationship. You’re the accountant or the librarian. You’re Jack’s mother and Bill’s daughter. You’re the girl who won the high school tennis tournament ten years ago. And somehow, knowing your place in all this inter-connectedness seems to make life more manageable.
One of my favorite authors, Alexander McCall Smith, describes this phenomenon as it plays out in a quiet Scottish village:
It was a Scotland of quiet manners and reserved friendliness, a Scotland in which nothing much happened, where lives were lived unadventurously and sometimes narrowly to the grave. The lives of such people could be read in the local kirkyard, their loyalty and their persistence etched into granite: Thomas Anderson, Farmer of East Mains, Beloved Husband of fifty-two years of…. and so on. These were people with place, wed to the very ground in which they would eventually be placed. The urban dead were reduced to ashes, disposed of, leaving no markers, and then forgotten; memory here was longer and gave the illusion that we counted for more. It was a simply matter of identity, thought Isabel. If people do not know who we are, then naturally we are less to them. Here, in this village, everybody would know who the other was, which made the crucial difference. (Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, 230.)
And yet, this need to be known is so fundamental to our humanity that even in big cities—those havens of anonymity and obscurity—we still find a way to carve out our own micro-communities. NYC has Greenwich Village, SoHo, and Little Italy. San Francisco has Chinatown, and London has Notting Hill. All in an attempt to give ourselves a sense of continuity and identity, a place where we can be known and we can know others.
And really, this is the way it must be. We are people made in the image of an omniscient, relational God—so why should it surprise us that a significant part of our souls cannot be at peace unless we are known as individuals? Why should it surprise us that the children of an all-knowing God must, not only know, but be known?
I was thinking the other day about how many of us struggle through this particular challenge of identity, specifically in wanting others to know us as individuals, to embrace us for who we really are, not simply who we project ourselves to be. Listen to the conversation among my generation and you’ll quickly hear words like “community” and “transparency” and “honesty.” We are desperate for others to know who we are. And yet, at the same time, we dare not risk them finding out--we dare not risk revealing our deepest secrets unless they reject us altogether.
This is why ultimately only He can fulfill of our need to be known. Only the One who already knows us, right down to the very hairs on our head. Only the One who has known us since our first moments of existence. Only the One who will know us to the end of our days. Because only this One--only He--knows us completely, and yet still loves us unconditionally.
And suddenly, in the words of Alexander McCall-Smith, “we count for more.” And when we do, our small, quiet, individual lives are invested with significance and purpose and meaning. We are known and we are loved. And this is what makes all the difference.
Southern Living
Now I’m a northern girl, but I’m no stranger to the South. I was actually born in South Carolina and spent several years there as a college student and newlywed. And having also done my fair share of traveling, I was pretty sure this move would be a fairly easy one. Still there are some things that I’ve noticed since my arrival, and while I wouldn’t say that I’m experiencing culture shock per se, I think it’s safe to say that I might be going through “heightened cultural awareness.”
So here are some things I've observed in the last two weeks. Let’s just file them under “You know you’re in the South when…”
- Within ten miles of crossing the state line, you see a homemade poster board sign that says simply “Civil War” and has an arrow pointing in the appropriate direction.
- Your local grocery store stocks Cheerwine popsicles in the freezer section.
- Your children, who only have memories of the North and Midwest, think that that the dirt is “ground up bricks.”
- The seller on Craigslist gives you a 50% discount on a couch when he discovers that your husband is a Baptist pastor and assures you that “it’s just the right thing to do.”
- Every lady in the church over the age of 65 is name Granny.
- Your six-year-old son wants to know why you don’t have a southern “accident.”
- Your seven-year-old daughter, when trying to describe the bug that was crawling on her clothes, can draw an accurate sketch of a tick.
- The first church supper includes fried chicken, poke salad, and sweet tea (with no rigatoni or pierogies in sight.)
- Your husband can preach in a linen suit and nobody bats an eye.
- The suspicious looking holes in your beautiful hardwood floors are precisely what you think they are. (Yes, it’s old damage and no, I don’t want to talk about it.)
All in all though, it’s been a pretty successful move and we’re loving the chance to live in a new area, be closer to family, and finally start to put down roots. And at the risk of stereotyping, all I have to say now is “Ya’ll come visit us sometime real soon.”
Home
Our second, a converted two-car garage that made the perfect newly-wed cottage… until baby made three which led us to…
Our third home, the rental house that my husband leased and moved in to one weekend while I was out of town for a wedding… without my knowing about it.
Our fourth home was a borrowed house in Hastings, New Zealand complete with an ancient pony, two dogs, and fields of neighboring sheep.
Our fifth, the townhouse we quickly rented on our return to the States when I was thirty-five weeks pregnant with #2 and we didn’t yet have a place to live.
Our sixth home was a parsonage we moved to with two weeks notice, a parsonage on the church’s property that had a three-thousand gallon coal-fired boiler in the basement…
And our latest home is the apartment we came to when we had to quickly leave aforementioned parsonage, the apartment in the town (three states away) that I had never even seen until we pulled up in our rented Penske moving truck.
And now nearly eleven years, seven moves, three states, and two countries later, we’re heading to our eighth home and our first house.
This week several friends have asked me how I’m coping with the moving and packing. Their question is usually accompanied by a compassionate empathy, the commiseration of a species who fundamentally hates to be uprooted and understands far too well the work and hassle of transplanting family. I simply reply that in all probability this will be our easiest move yet. Having actually seen this house and being familiar with the area, I feel well ahead of the game.
And yet, there’s a sadness about moving even when it’s on to bigger and better (and hopefully, more permanent) things. A sadness that comes from leaving new-found friends and leaving the house that sheltered my family, even if ever so briefly. For me, it’s saying good-bye to the walls that watched my children play, the windows that shined sunlight on their waking faces, and the rooms that were silent witnesses to the love and joy and pain of being family.
And I find I leave a bit of myself in each place.
**(The picture above is not our new house but isn't it lovely? Perhaps one day, when we're sixty-years married, my husband and I can nest there.)
Hometown Wisdom
In the end, the judge in the case, a dog lover himself who had brought his new Jack Russell puppy to court that day because he was “too young to be left alone;” decided to extend mercy to these delinquent canines on the grounds that they behaved themselves for the next year.
But Floyd’s also home to an earthier set and has been a gathering place for clean living, free loving, mystical creative-types for the last several decades. The town’s streets, once populated by professional offices, are now lined with alternative shops, art galleries, and music venues. And so one morning while we were there, my husband and I took advantage of that lovely phenomenon called “grandparents” to slip out to a local coffee house run by a high school classmate. It’s an unusual blend of rustic and groovy with the service and atmosphere as smooth as the coffee.
I was getting in touch with my inner seventies, when I strolled over to the bulletin board. Like the town, the notices were a mix of the practical (For Rent: 3br, 2 bath mobile home on 1 acre) and prophetic (Yoga classes, eastern remedies, and progressive schools).Then I saw it--stuck among the fliers and cards was an 8 ½ x11 sheet of paper typed with the simple words:
“Try forgiveness: renew somebody else, regain yourself.”
For some reason, placed as it was alongside an advertisement for meditation classes, I got the sense that it hadn’t been posted by the local Baptist church.
Still, as I read it, something about the power of forgiveness rang true and I couldn’t help but recognize that all of us—no matter what creed or background—long for the certainty that our wrongs have been made right. It’s a drive so deep, so fundamental, so human that we can’t be at peace until the person we’ve wronged sets us free. And the need to forgive is so equally powerful that if we don’t, we end up enslaving ourselves.
Left at that, few of us would argue. From AA to the local synagogue, we all acknowledge that bitterness over past wrongs can consume us and turn us into one dimensional people, ever driven, ever absorbed by them. But is that enough? Is it enough to embrace the power of forgiveness, to know that it is worth pursuing? Is it that we need to be convinced of its value--or is it that we need to be empowered to actually forgive? Because the reality is, how am I--a broken person herself in need of renewal--going to find the inner strength to forgive another broken person also in need of renewal?
It has to start someplace other than me.
And this is where Christianity turns all other philosophy on its head. While other religions may express truth (see above), Christianity says that Christ Himself is Truth, that His life and death embody it all. So when it comes to forgiveness, it is His perfect life and self-less death that renews us, releases us, and enables us to do the same for others. It is His forgiveness that makes all other forgiveness possible. It is through Him that we are no longer defined by sin, and it is through Him that we are new and we are free.
So yes, by all means, please take the advice of a flier in a hippie coffee shop: do “try” forgiveness because really, there is life-changing power in it, just like there is deep magic in redemption. But know this—hope in this—because it doesn’t start with us, it won’t end with us either.