Moving From Home

The 10 moves we made before I was 8 years old formed an insatiable hunger in me to have a real home; a place filled with memories and history; a place that ties me not to an unseen and possibly scary future but to a solid known past. I hunger for a secure home so much that when the economy tanked and the loan for the remodel we'd just finished looked as though it would bankrupt us, I went back to work full-time to try to save the house I'd put so much of my time, energy and emotions into. I want this house to be here for my children now and for their children in years to come. I don't want to do what my Mother had done.

She retired in 1988 after more than a 25-year career as an elementary teacher. She sold the house we built in 1967, the first new house she had ever owned, and moved to Arizona, far away from the Kansas where my dad had abandoned us. She was finally free of Kansas. I was devastated. Never again could I return to the house in which I'd spent 11 years of my life and knew better than the back of my hand. Strangers were cooking meals in our kitchen, watching TV in our living room, taking cover in our basement during tornado warnings. Every inch of that house held tangible remains of countless memories I was never going to be able to share with my children. There was no place called home anymore.

This loss became entangled with the grief of my Mom's death. Then seeded with the estrangement and subsequent death of my Dad, it grew into a roadblock on my path to wherever Jesus and I were headed. Then I happened upon my now-grown next door neighbor through Facebook. She is living in her childhood home with her family and her Mom is living in my childhood home, next door. I can't describe the utter joy and relief I felt at finding out this news. I became instantly free of more than I even realized I was carrying. And I was now ready to leave my childhood home and all the memories of my Mom in the hands of this good neighbor. The roadblock is gone and an overwhelming peace, one that I can't fully describe or understand, has taken its place. Jesus and I can get up from the front lawn where I'd parked my rear end ten years ago and get going to the next place in Kansas where my heart needs healing.

It seems this healing is going to happen in a different place than the home I'm sitting in for the last time. Tomorrow movers show up to take the boxes, furniture & miscellaneous objects we've collected and put it into a much smaller rental house that my son and I will be living in for the next 12 months. The economy wins and I lose my house.

Because I have no control over this event, every moment is an opportunity to look for things to be grateful for. I am also believing that God really does have plans for my good and not my harm. I am ready to move on. To put this house, all that it's meant to my family, all that God did for us here, behind me. I'm ready to squeeze 3,600 sf of stuff into 2,100 sf of rental space and over the next 12 months set myself free from the bonds of material ownership. I will become a Craig's List expert.

And for my friend John "Tigger" McG, who finds my blog depressing, here's to taking my Irish melancholy into an unprecedented future and working my Sanguine muscles until I can take you on. Anytime.

Walking Backward

I left Kansas in 1981 with all my essential possessions crammed in the back of my 1970's, sun-oxidized silver Toyota Celica. Heading for Texas, I left my books, much-loved stuffed animals and assorted memorabilia to gather dust in my 1960's groovy lime green and navy blue room. Driving away from my Mother and the house in which I'd grown up was nearly the hardest thing I had done up to that point in my life, but I had to move out and try to separate from the pain of the past. I had to make a fresh start and I desperately prayed that I was leaving Kansas forever.Regardless of that prayer, Kansas has never let me fully leave. It sticks to the story of my life like a piece of spinach in my teeth. Kansas; with its Dorothy & Toto jokes, supposedly flat nothingness and "flyover state" status. I even met a woman who remarked that "everyone she's met from Kansas was so backward!" And she was from Lubbock. But more than the cultural labels that Kansans counter with farmer-like quiet dignity, the pain of bad choices, mine and others, remained to follow me from that great state of buffalo and sunflowers. Kansas has just meant pain.Ever since leaving, I have been on a journey to overcome and be set free from the Kansas I saw in my past, but no more so than over the past two years. Part of this desert experience has been about going backward into that pain and watching Jesus pick up each memory and, in ways only He could pull off, begin to heal and redeem. He's used the book my sister wrote of her journey back through Kansas to put the pieces of her fragmented childhood together. He's used Facebook to reconnect me with friends from the high school I bailed on my Junior year and the other high school I barely graduated from. I realize as I write this, these steps leading to memory after memory, some long forgotten, some unforgettable, are through the mountains I saw off in the distance last year as I stood in this spiritual desert, having just sat my behind next to a rock for about a year. I knew eventually that through these shadowed mountains was the path that led out of this place I'd grown to love.

I read recently that some cultures believe we look to the past we can see and have our backs to the future we cannot see; that we walk backward into what's next. I've been walking backward, with my eyes viewing what's past and with each step of healing, I've seen Kansas grow more and more beautiful, and can honestly say that I am grateful for every moment of my life there. Even the horrible, terrible moments were steps that brought me to this place with this Jesus. I have many more steps to trace over, with countless moments of pain to relive, but I'm ready.

Ready to go again, backward.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.~ TS Eliot ~