Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

faith & spirituality

What if what I want is right in front of me?

I’ve been thinking about grass lately. You know, the typically green kind that surrounds my house. Maybe that’s because it’s currently buried under a few inches of snow and even if it wasn’t it would be more brown than green.

Winter.

Kind of unavoidable unless I choose to live in some tropical location and that just wouldn’t work at all.

I can handle winter mostly because I know that spring is sure to follow.

Even if I can’t see the grass, I know it’s there. And even if the trees are brown and gray, I know it won’t be long until they pop with the kind of color  that’s almost indescribable.

There’s peace in that.

Some of you might remember  that I get a bit restless sometimes. Even if I’m happy about our present circumstances, I start to dream, imagine, wonder what life would be like somewhere else. In some other set of circumstances.

It’s the old “grass is always greener” syndrome and I am not immune to its charms.

green pastures

Dave Robinson | Creative Commons | via unsplash—

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Just this week, we had that awkward “where is home?” discussion again. We sometimes refer to Illinois as home and sometimes we call Pennsylvania home and it’s terribly confusing, even to us.

No matter where we are right now, if I see a home for sale I almost always look it up just out of curiosity. I guess I’m nosy or HGTV deprived. I made the “mistake” of asking my nosy questions out loud in my parents’ hearing which prompted all kinds of not-so-subtle hints about properties that were available practically next door.

Even I began to wonder: What are we still doing in Pennsylvania? Should we move back to Illinois?

My heart tugs toward this option any time I spend time with my family because it is harder than I ever thought it would be to live 800 miles from home, even as a grown-up with great friends and great community. My heart seems permanently torn between two places.

But God made it clear, as He always does, that now is not the time to go anywhere. The very day I was plotting our return to Illinois, I read the story of Abraham and Sarah in the Bible, the couple who leaves what is familiar to go to a place that is unknown all because God says. And while their story is not ours completely (no baby in old age, please and thank you), it is the one story that has been consistent in our journey toward whatever we’re journeying toward.

So, when people ask us if we’d move back to Illinois in a heartbeat if we had no ties here, our answer is complicated. It isn’t jobs or schools or church or even relationships that keep us here.

It is God. (So, if you need someone to blame, you can go straight to the top!)

Believe me, I’m not always okay with that.

But I also can’t deny it.

When I want to “go,” He says “stay.”

And I protest that maybe I’d like to see what that grass over there is like. It might be greener than the grass we have here.

And though I know that I need to tend my own proverbial grass if I want it to be greener, the lesson doesn’t always stick.

This week, though, a familiar verse from the Psalms settled anew in my soul.

Maybe you know it.

“He makes me lie down in green pastures.”

It’s the second verse of Psalm 23, and until this week, I just passed right over it.

I’ve heard the pastures described as not exactly lush or overwhelmingly green, but that’s not what stuck with me this time.

No, it’s the whole “lie down” thing.

 Not pass through. Not run across. Not stand and admire and be on my way.

Lie. Down.

Another version says “he lets me rest in green meadows.”

I can’t remember the last time I lay in the grass looking up at the sky. Who has time for that kind of juvenile behavior? Plus, I’d probably get bugs and dirt in my hair. And the ground might be cold.

But seriously, this concept of resting, even lying down, in this grass right here, was kind of mind-blowing.

Dave Robinson | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Dave Robinson | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Basically, I hear God saying: Look around you. There is a green pasture right here, and it’s all for you. Rest. Lie down, even. There’s no need to rush on to the next thing. I’ll let you know when it’s time to get up and move on.

There’s peace in that, too, even if it makes me worry because I’m not the one in control.

I can’t promise that I’ll never pine for greener grass over there somewhere, but I feel like this is a breakthrough. I’m going to rest in the green grass right here. Or try to.

What about you? How easy is it for you to rest in your circumstances?

What helps you remain content with God’s plan?

 

When music takes me back in time (and I'm not sure I want to leave the past)

We’d been away from church for a couple of weeks, and I always forget how dry and empty I am when we go through a stretch like that where we’re traveling on Sundays or visiting family. I think it’ll be no big deal and when we’re finally back with our church family it hits me. Then, all of a sudden, I find myself sobbing in the middle of singing. Tears of gratitude to be back. Tears of sorrow at my own pitiful state. Tears of joy because I am safe and there is hope.

I’m learning to never leave home for church without some tissues tucked in my bag because I’m sure to need them if I don’t have them.

So, it was all of those things that had tears streaming down my cheeks at church on Sunday. But it was something else, as well.

It was the songs themselves. And the older I get the more I believe that songs are a portal to another time and place. If a book can sweep me into another time and place, one I’ve never lived, then songs have the same power to connect me with my former self.

Joshua Earle | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Joshua Earle | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Our song time opened with one we sang at church camp, where my husband and I served as staff to high schoolers who were dealing with a lot of the same issues we struggled with as 20-somethings. That song was followed by one that broke me in college, just a year or two after I’d opened my life to Jesus’s leading.

And in an instant I was no longer in the middle of sanctuary in the middle of winter crying with my husband by side and children nearby. I was sweating in a simple chapel in the woods, surrounded by teenagers jumping, shouting, passionately declaring that God was the cry of their heart. I was flat on my face in the basement of a college chapel, undone by my sin and the love of a King who would sacrifice Himself so I could live. I was a girl again, a decade or more younger, with fresh hopes and dreams who couldn’t imagine knowing any other life than one that had Jesus in it.

Snapped back to my present state, I cried again, wondering where that girl had gone. She had no idea what was to come, and had she been given a clue, I think she would have ignored it as impossible. I cried because there are days I want to be that girl again. To believe the best. To still have hope and dreams. To be passionately pursuing the God who changed everything.

And there are days I would never want to be her again because she was so naive and unaware of the world around her. Of the hard realities of life. She knew little about what it means to persevere, to forgive, to endure. Hers was a simple faith that didn’t always ask questions. She was motivated by good behavior and what others thought and her grown-up counterpart wouldn’t trade the faith she has now, as hard as it is, for what she had before.

The girl who sang those songs years ago and the woman who sings them now, they’re one. I cannot be who I am today without that girl from long ago. Even if I sometimes pity her. Even if I sometimes wish it could all be different.

But I can’t go back. I can only go forward. And words like this spur me on:

There is a kind of bravery born from understanding that what lies in front of you is merely the end result of every choice you’ve ever made, and there is nothing left but to follow that path to its end. (Billy Coffey, In the Heart of the Dark Wood, p. 348)

And,

I was learning the secrets of life: that you could become the woman you’d dared to dream of being, but to do so you were going to have to fall in love with your own crazy, ruined self. (Anne Lamott, Small Victories, p. 101)

This is where I find myself when the tears pool and my present self fades. When I remember who I was and compare her to who I am. I am needing to leave the old behind, to follow this path to its end, even if it’s not the path I would have chosen, and accept the pieces of myself that I want to hide and dismiss, those places where I see only wrong and not enough and different.

I want to love my “crazy, ruined self.” The me I was and the me I am now.

This is what I want from the year ahead. This is what I mean when I say I want to be “whole.”

What was the last song that took you back to another time and place?