I was going to read the Bible tonight. I got to my room,
ready to settle in, and then I realized that I left the Book and my journal in
my car. Oh well. I wasn’t that determined. I wish I could be.
I visited REI for the first time post-Seattle today. I was
wearing my Sounders scarf as I often do in hopes of running into someone who
might know them or where they’re from. It worked. An employee asked if I was a
Sounders fan. I lied and said I used to be, before I moved here. It was a
resentful tone in my voice, one to make the demon on my shoulder proud. She
told me she used to live there, just moved in fact. I halted my movement toward
the flannel shirts to extend this worthy dialogue. Me too. She asked how I was
adjusting. Not well. She agreed.
I asked how she ended up in Chicago. Turns out, she’s
originally from here. Just. Like. Me. We left the conversation encouraging each
other and echoing back and forth, “it’s
going to get better.” “It’s going to get better.” “It’s going to get better.”
But what if it doesn’t.
I ask myself, what is it about the Northwest that holds me
so captive. The trees, the water, the mountains. The people, the culture, the
churches. The beauty, the weather, the smell. The coffee, the freighters, the
houses built on hills. The sunsets. The ministry. My relationships, my history,
my growth. My mistakes, my progress, my faith. My story. It’s all there.
I like to think I could get on and be okay without those
things. Only time will tell. But what I cannot get past or recover from, what
makes me cling to even the worst times in that city, and leaves me totally
desperate to return is that I just don’t know how to love God in Chicago like I
loved Him in Seattle.
I don’t know how to read the Bible here. I don’t know how to
pray here. I don’t know how to talk about God here. Or sing worship. Or journal. I don’t know how
to serve. I am a different person here.
And I should have seen this coming. Every break, every
weekend I returned home the past decade, was so barren. So fruitless in our
relationship. Everything was on pause until I could go back. I imagine it like
a relationship with periods of time in which the distance is too great for it to progress and there’s no possible communication. Wouldn’t that hold a heart hostage? Of course, it’s not like that at all because, no, God doesn’t
only exist in Malibu and, no, he doesn’t only exist in Burien—even if it is the center
of the universe.
It’s embarrassing. I used to preach, ‘God is home.’ No matter
where we are, God is home. But I don’t know how to live that. I still believe
it. I just don’t know how to let Him be
that for me. But I’m going to figure it out. It may take a couple years, and I may
be starting all over again, taking huge leaps backward, and re-growing in every
possible way, but I’m going to figure it out. And at the end of all this, if I
can love God here like I used to—here, without the mountains, the water, the
trees, the hills, the coffee, the weather, the smell, the sunsets, the
people—if I can love God here like I used to, then someone needs to write a book
about it or at the very least, a romantic film.
If not, I guess I can always move back--that's usually what they do in the movies anyway.
