The street lights dance across the black waters of the Ohio as I trek through the mountains of West Virginia and slide into the gently rolling Piedmont hills of North Carolina. The autumn days are waning here and the air is a crisp sheet of ice that cuts my face. I am surrounded by the beauty of slumbering trees and dying leaves. It’s a wonder that we find so much beauty in the death of coming winter – the spectacle of leaves as they lose their color, the dimming hue of the grass, and the fresh mist of the first frost.
I’m sure it has a lot to do with the sheer sight of it – the warm, earthy tones that make us think of nothing else than a warm blanket and a cup of sweet coffee. Maybe it has something to do with the anticipation of new life, the reminder that life is a cycle of the shedding of old things and the birth of new possibilities. But for me, I think this cycle serves as reminder that as far I have come, maybe I have not come so far as I’d like to think.
In August, I packed everything I owned into a Jeep and made the 400 mile trip to North Carolina. Wake Forest University was an entirely new place, an entirely new program of study for me, and an entirely new family of friends. I thought for a moment that I had made it, that the distance was good, and that my story was about to change in large ways. And it has. But still something lingers…something that says I may have been a little naive, and that even across the distance, some of the things from Kentucky may still be clinging on to me as I go forward. And, I suppose, I have my soul to thank for that. After all, we are embodied spirits, and while I may be able to pick up and move my body as far across the country as I want to, my spirit is not so easily uprooted. It’s because the people and places of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, and so many others are a part of me – they are a part of my spirit, too. I come to find out that no matter how far I take my body, these will never be too far from my spirit.
It must be the death of one more season, or maybe the end of a semester and thus the closing of one major chapter of my life, that has given me pause to reflect. And these days I think on so many questions – Why do I pray, when I don’t know what the response will be? Why are we doing what we are doing in ministry? Wounded healers we call ourselves, but I wonder what craziness would possess us that we should choose this vocation? How do I change this embodied spirit, when so much pulls me backward as well as forward? What is it that calls me forward and why must I continue on?
I know that I must answer that call forward. And, I suppose, it is my soul that is to thank for that as well – a soul that constantly renews, that vivifies, that shakes down to my bones when I am stagnant, that rests in the wonder of dying leaves and crisp air, that welcomes new communities and calls out to old ones, that changes with each new season, new person and new place, and that finds home, someway and somehow, when home is not always the easiest to find.
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