The Pantry Club

“You aren’t going to blog about this are you?!?!?”

While my brother-in-law was playfully enquiring about my future posts, my mom was carefully pouring alcohol into shot glasses, trying to create a layered effect. shots

As a send-off at the end of my Christmas break, my family did a round of shots.

Lest anyone worry, my mom described them as “wussy shots” –something with an embarrassing name and an alcohol that doesn’t burn.

And my pregnant sister abstained.

We toasted to another semester, to family and “To The Pantry Club!” and swallowed the creamy drink.


In my childhood home, the pantry is a 15 x 8 foot hallway, flanked by floor-to-ceiling shelves. It has some creepy corners where a flashlight would be useful if one was to explore. The spare keys hang on the flat side of an outer shelf and on another, the board is marked with short lines and dates, designating our heights at different ages.

The pantry holds Christmas decorations, a fruit dehydrator, catering apparatus, and a respectable collection of glass jars. There is a supply of water, a deep freezer, the pet food, and a complicated trash system to accommodate recycling.  My cousin once spent 45 sweaty minutes in one of those empty trash cans during an epic game of Hide-and-Seek-in-the-Dark.

It has party supplies, canning supplies, baking supplies, and emergency supplies. A few shelves are dedicated to spices and dry goods and canned food. And in the corner, the stash of alcohol hides.

adventure raceAs a Labor Day tradition, my parents have for many years hosted an annual Adventure Extravaganza Weekend. The weekend might involve all sorts of activities: a bike ride, shooting, a poker tournament, backyard parties, a yard games contest, and outings into town. People camp in the yard or find a couch to claim; everyone takes turns prepping meals. The centerpiece of the weekend is a team event called the “Adventure Race” which is a series of competitive activities that are limited only by my parents creativity and my moms fear of people getting hurt.

As “the regulars” have gotten older, the weekend has included more babies and less beer. But, in its early years, there were no babies. It was in that time that “The Pantry Club” was born. The red curtain separating the pantry from the kitchen would be drawn and toasts and cheers would heard from the small gathering hiding in a certain corner of the pantry.

Thus, for me as well as many of those whom I love, the pantry speaks of the Peterson house.

It speaks of the hospitality of my parents and the adventures that many associate with the house.

It speaks of my mom, her presence palpable in so many of the treasures hidden on the top shelves that she insists on keeping.

It speaks of my childhood, noted in the red and blue lines on the marked board and captured in the memories veiled in the stuff.

It speaks of friends and food and fun.

It speaks of home.

And so, join me in a toast: To The Pantry Club!

 

Pioneer Blood

Home was dusty. Home smelled like cows. Home was New Mexico.

I grew up in one of those small towns where everybody knows your name. Several generations of my family have called this area in the middle of nowhere “home,” even back when it was just a train stop in the desert. I’ve been enthusiastically greeted by people who have known not only me, but my mom since she was in diapers. Six degrees of separation? No one needs that many to find someone you grew up with, dated or are related to. There is a tangible connection between neighbors when anything exciting happens: a new restaurant opens, someone famous wanders through or a school board meeting takes a dramatic turn. There is a sense of unity as we participate in the same traditions as our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents before us, even rituals as simple as dressing in purple to support high school sports every game day.

sunThere’s nothing quite like the community of a small town to build a runway for a dreamer to fly, however. Like my pioneer ancestors before me, I heard the call of the unknown and unexplored. Home was far too confining. I ached with it.

Home then became Baylor, a Baptist university in the middle of Texas. Home was green and gold. Home was red brick and late nights and racing to beat newspaper deadlines.

At this Christian journalism school, I learned to investigate everything. My identity. My relationships. My world. My Bible. If faith is a prism, college threw the light in a different way. I learned a group of people can become your family and then, when their season is done, leave you haunted by their impact. I learned healing can come through quick prayer, but it can also come through years of pain and doctors and hard-earned revelations. I learned a home you choose, even a temporary one, can be a sanctuary. I learned running away from home doesn’t mean your problems stay behind. I discovered belonging and calling and true freedom that isn’t tied to a place, but a Truth.

But college was a training ground, a preparation for the next season yet to come, and in the middle of all this searching for both freedom and belonging, I stumbled upon still another home. I studied abroad at Oxford and found England to feel more home-like than anything I knew. I had studied their history, their culture and the great literature of this little island. Walking down those ancient streets and experiencing Britain for myself was like falling in love – terrifying in its vast newness while welcoming me in as if I had always belonged there. A completely foreign place and culture, and yet, I fit. A puzzle piece snapping into place. It was like nowhere else in my life of traveling and exploring. The loneliness of being far away was nothing new – in fact, it was far sweeter – because I have known the loneliness of being out of place in the midst of familiarity. Out of the two, I’d take the loneliness of adventure any day.

But I wasn’t meant to stay in Britain, not just now anyway, though I’ve been back and will always keep returning, no matter how short the stay.

So now home is a busy suburb in Alabama. Home is a church in a warehouse. Home is mixing up the words “friends” and “family” because here, all are welcome.

Home is a quiet apartment, where the clock can sometimes tick loud in the dark and the battle for joy is tangibly present. But I’ve long since found home to be unrestrained to a physical location. Home is a journey, a path that meanders and crisscrosses and exists in several places at once. A hometown, a homecoming, a home-like feeling, a home address… all of these are simultaneous and equally valid, though still ultimately lacking.

I never really understood this enduring homesickness until I read it described by C.S. Lewis:

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

Though I cannot see it yet, I know the reason I’ll always be searching, a wanderlust girl with pioneer blood. I have yet to make it Home.

*   *   *   *   *   

jenna“Pioneer Blood” was written by Jenna DeWitt. Jenna is the managing editor of MORF Magazine, a resource for youth ministers, mentors and parents of teenagers. She has a bachelor’s in journalism from Baylor University, where she edited a bunch of student publications, became a fan of C.S. Lewis and drank Dr Pepper floats with Blue Bell ice cream like a true Texan. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, though if you ask her where home is, she will tell you “it’s complicated.” You can find her on Twitter @jenna_dewitt and on Tumblr at jennadewitt.tumblr.com.

 

 

Home Plate

I am fond of irrationally loving things. I get a little too giddy about game 121 of a long baseball season. You would have no idea it was a game that hardly mattered by the way I am yelling obscenities at a single missed strike call by an umpire who is deciding within fractions of an inch whether the little white ball flying in at 90 MPH went over the plate or not. I cannot rationally defend why I love baseball or college football or Texas or Dr. Pepper, but I will fight with every breath in me to love them all the same. There is something in me which desperately needs the rousing breath of unreasoned, childlike passions.

I was at a baseball game a few years ago with my dad. We were sitting in the third deck in the midst of one those late summer Texas evenings where cirrus clouds hang high like streaks of vanilla in an otherwise sherbet colored sky. You can put on Explosions in the Sky and get a feeling of how I feel about these kinds of evenings. Next to us was a father with his 5 year old son. The son was falling in love with the game; the father was there to watch.  The son knew the players, he knew the rules, and he knew that the only way to watch the game was standing up on the tip of his toes leaning against the rail ready for the suddenness of something grand in the midst of the mundane rituals of a summertime game.

Irrational passions like baseball fandom demand our hearts be ready to be broken and spoken to in a way completely counter to most realities in our lives. Life tends towards the typical, but our hearts restlessly ask to be reconciled to and even wrecked upon something more. One of my favorite quotes about baseball from one of its great living chroniclers, Joe Posnanski, reminds me of this: “I never argue with people who say that baseball is boring, because baseball is boring. And then, suddenly, it isn’t. And that’s what makes it great.”

The boy waited on his tiptoes. He was calling out the players’ names as they ran out onto the field. His favorite player was every boy’s favorite. His activities were the accents of love as love. He could not explain why the game grabbed him, but it did. At some point I loved the game the same way. We have videos of me with a bat bigger than me swinging and hitting whiffle balls at the age of three. I’ll never forget the triple play I made in tee ball, or the perfect game I went to at the Ballpark in Arlington when I was in first grade. Those were moments of magic. When I was a teenager, the magic died. I felt nothing when I watched the game.

In the recent movie Boyhood the most poignant scene of the movie for me comes when an adolescent boy asks his vagabond father:

“Dad, there’s no real magic in the world, right?”

Right. We all answer the question the same way at some point. There is a death for all our irrational loves. A death held in their inability to sustain against the pervasive banality of our lives.

When I came home for the summer in 2008 after a very bad year in college, I decided to start going back to a few Texas Rangers games. There was some hope that year for the team I grew up loving more than any other team. The Rangers had just traded for this guy named Josh Hamilton. He was a drug addict who had just made it back to baseball the year before after a 5 year hiatus, and he was looking for a second chance at the game. The probability of Hamilton picking up a bat after five years and hitting a baseball well was very low, much less so because he had spent those five years blowing almost 2 million dollars on drugs. But something truly magical happened that year. Within the first month, it became evident that Hamilton was a player with transcendent talent. I went to one game after another and by the All-Star break I had attended over 20 games, more than I had gone to in the previous five years combined.

The crescendo of the year came when Hamilton hit in the Home Run Derby at the Mecca of baseball, old Yankee Stadium. His first trip to the plate in the derby was the most extraordinary display of baseball prowess I have ever witnessed. He hit 28 home runs, and at one point, he hit 14 in a row without recording an out. Each home run seemed to go farther than the last until he was hitting 500 ft home runs like they were routine. His performance was so remarkable that the usually surly New York faithful rained down a chant which I still get chills recalling in my head: “Hamilton! Hamilton! Hamilton! Hamilton.” There was magic in the air that night in New York, and baseball had romanced my heart once again.

The truth is there was always magic in the game, magic in the rituals of the game, in the batters’ gimmicks, pitchers’ grimaces, summer evening skies, and well broken leather. I don’t always catch it, but after losing and re-finding my love for baseball, I find a fullness in even the smallest of details. It’s something like finding life in the breaking of bread and forgiveness in the bitterness of wine.

When the fifth inning of the game came, the boy’s focus suddenly shifted towards his father. And with the absolute confidence of a child he said: “Fifth inning is ice cream inning!”

Dutifully, the father took his son down the aisle and out to the concessions while I sat there grinning like I had not grinned in a long time.

The Royal Hotel

If your home is your castle, my husband and I have been living with the drawbridge down for about ten years. In that time, fifteen housemates have come and gone, and eight of these have lived with us for two years or more. In our four-bedroom Victorian house, community is our way of life.

Sometimes, when I describe all this to someone I’ve just met, they look at me with wonder and admiration. “Oh that’s so beautiful to share your home with other people,” they sometimes say, “but I just couldn’t do it.” And at these times I wish that I kept a cheat sheet of former and current housemates’ phone numbers in my pocket.

Talking with them would certainly temper any idealistic notions.

****

For both my husband and I, the desire to live in community was born in college. When he showed up as a freshman at the University of Southern California, two seniors helped him move in. He soon discovered that these seniors lived next door in a cramped dorm room, choosing to forgo apartment life as a part of their Christian commitment to hospitality. That year my husband watched them model kindness, patience, truth-telling and forgiveness in the nitty-gritty of daily life, and his vision was forever altered.

For my part, I liked undergraduate life so much that I extended it for six years, working as a campus minister at a small women’s college. During that time I lived in a household of 35 for a summer, led spring break trips in tight quarters, and attended overnight training events, as well as an annual two-week “camp” for campus ministers. Though all of this intentional togetherness was uncomfortable, and at times painful, for an insecure introvert like me, it was also strangely life-giving.

And so, by the time we met and married in July of 2005, my husband and I were both committed to some form of intentional, extended community in our home. We, of course, had no idea what a roller coaster this would be.

****

To begin with the obvious: life after college is not like life in college. There are property taxes, for one, and many other bills that you never imagined. Remember the four-bedroom Victorian house I mentioned in the introduction? Victorian=more than a hundred years old. More than a hundred years old=constantly falling apart. Now add full-time jobs, graduate school, and two babies to the mix of bills and renovation, and  you have two very distracted people who barely have time for each other, much less a parade of housemates.

We have not always done well.

With one housemate it took us over a year to discover he didn’t feel comfortable on the first-floor of the house because of its perpetual untidiness. Another housemate hid in her room the whole time she lived with us because that summer we filled every bedroom and the living room with beds and people. When we began living with another family with two young children, I used to hide on the porch and cry during dinner because I couldn’t stand so much chaos so late in the day.

Sometimes it amazes me that we kept this up so long. But then again, there is something about life together.

Just a few nights ago, the five grown-ups were sitting together in the kitchen, having “adult dinner” while the kids bounced off the walls in the living room. Someone had brought a bottle of red wine up from the basement, and we were talking about this and that, telling stories and laughing about the ridiculous things that had happened to us that day. This scene is not unusual. It’s just a natural, spontaneous outgrowth of living in close quarters.  Like college for grown-ups.

And as I looked around the table I knew. I knew that I was blessed. Sitting there I was surrounded by a rich network of people-these current housemates and all the others who have stayed for a while-and these were people I knew and loved.

Over the years we had annoyed one another, confronted one another, and watched one another (with front row seats!) make all the mistakes of marriage, parenting and singleness. But all of this grit and dirt makes the forgiveness, encouragement, and laughter over a bottle of red wine that much more sweet.

Isn’t this the essence of any community, large or small, tied by blood, or marriage, or an old Victorian house?: We are known and (somehow, miraculously) we are loved.

I am beginning to suspect that it is the ‘and’ that makes all the difference.

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Photo by Nell Howard on Creative Commons

Hunting

We were armed, of course—with a very rational checklist, like all house-hunters are.

It looked something like this:

– Four bedrooms (we have three daughters and lots of house guests)

– At least two full bathrooms, including one of the main floor (did I mention three daughters?)

– A spacious kitchen with lots of counter space (Jason and I usually cook together—there’s often a daughter and a dog in the mix, too)

– A dedicated space for me to work (I work from home, which had always meant carving out a cramped corner of the living room)

– Closets! (Closets, closets, closets! Our current house had not a single closet or pantry on the entire first floor—and did I mention three daughters? And backpacks, soccer shin guards, volleyballs, a cello, and more pairs of shoes, boots, and muddy cleats than I could count?)

– A hang-out space of some sort (as our daughters grew into teenagers, we wanted to be sure they regularly invited friends)

– A fireplace (for those cozy, picturesque evenings together as a family)

– A front porch (I have always considered this a must for a house)

– A location in our current neighborhood (walking distance to the girls’ schools, cafes, the library, the farmers’ market, etc.)

Oh, and there was one must-not-have: NO black walnut tree. We’d had enough of the squirrel colony that congregated in the backyard of our current house, and enough of the curses we uttered each time our current tree dropped its ample harvest on our roof, cars, and patio furniture.

In general, we thought our checklist was perfectly reasonable. And we weren’t in a huge hurry to find something—we had already survived two years as a newly-formed family of five in the house I had purchased for three (as a single mom, just months before I met Jason). We were just “keeping our eyes out.”

Each year, for about three years, we went to see a handful of houses. Some met the requirements on our checklist, but were just too expensive. Others had a significant flaw (or two)—a visible bulging in the foundation; a tiny, unworkable living room (but lots of space everywhere else); terrible kitchens (without any hope for feasible remodel plans); a shared driveway or no garage.

There were also a couple of houses that could have worked, but were somehow just “off.” I began to differentiate “house-hunting,” which requires being armed with a list and a realtor, from “home-hunting,” which calls for a fully-loaded gut (and a refusal to buy into the optimism gushing from the realtor’s mouth).

With each visit to a new listing, the hope that buoyed us as the realtor unlocked the front door, quickly deflated. And with each disappointment, we returned to our cozy home determined to find ways to make it work. Trips to IKEA resulted in more storage, and a remodel of the basement added a second bathroom and a fourth bedroom, so two of our girls no longer had to share. After three years of “keeping an eye out” for houses, we simply stopped.

house4saleAnd then, one February day in 2013, I was walking the dog and saw a new For Sale sign. Even from the sidewalk, something about the house spoke to me—to my gut, as cheesy as that sounds.

As it turns out, it was The One—even though it didn’t meet all of the requirements on our ever-so-rational checklist. There were two full bathrooms, but no bathroom of any sort of the first floor (this is apparently a cost of loving 100-year-old houses). There was a beautiful sunroom with built-in bookshelves and three walls of windows, which has become my dream office, but no front porch. The kitchen was workable, but not nearly as spacious as we had hoped for during our house hunting. And there was a wood-burning fireplace, as advertised in the listing, but during the inspection we discovered that it wasn’t a working fireplace and couldn’t actually be fixed to become one, short of completely rebuilding the chimney.

homecomingdinner2013Yes, there are four bedrooms and plenty of beautiful closets, and the location is perfect. Even more importantly, much of what we envisioned for our new home has become a reality—less clutter, more space for family and friends to be together, the ability to host big meals (that first fall we did a Homecoming dinner for our daughter and 22 of her friends and a chili cook-off for 50+). And as a family, we’ve enjoyed two cozy winters of together time, gathered by the fire—the people we bought the house from installed a gas fireplace (not our original ideal, but it sure has made it easy to light a fire every evening rather than just every-so-often).

In short, this is our home and it has been just right from the beginning, regardless what our list said. Even that first summer, when we realized that big tree in the backyard was—you guessed it—a black walnut (this is a danger of buying a house in February and not being an expert in tree bark identification), we had to laugh as we grumbled. After all, we had been home-hunting, not house-hunting.

 

Home Church

The reasons we chose the church weren’t particularly flattering. It was close, under five minutes from our house if traffic was favorable. They had a pretty thin looking praise team, so if they’d have us, we would both be able to play. The pastor seemed nice and the sermons didn’t strain my liberal sensitivities too hard. And it was relatively anonymous, so we didn’t feel the scarlet A’s branding us every time we entered the sanctuary.

We were married now, but that hadn’t always been the case. We had attended church together for five years, but in the before days, we had been married to other people, and lots of people in the church community of our town knew it.

countrychurchIn my previous life, when I had changed churches, I always knew immediately when I found my new church home. In those instances, there was a simple feeling of belonging. Even if it hadn’t made sense to me why I felt that way, I could tell when a new congregation was home.

But I didn’t have that feeling here.

I told my husband I’d probably feel more at home when I started serving in the congregation. I told him that when I was giving something of myself to the church, I would get that feeling of belonging. It wouldn’t just be the church that I went to, but it would become my church.

We never wanted our past to come to the surface and catch the leadership of the church unawares, so we had lunch with the pastors, one of us gripping the leg of the other who was telling their part of the story, trying to send strength to each other through leg compressions. Grace was extended, and we were invited to join the team of musicians. We had our first rehearsal with the team. We played our first Sunday, almost a year to the day from the last time we had played together, and it was a joy-filled experience. Everything was coming together in the best possible way.

And still the feeling of “home” evaded me.

I didn’t know what was wrong with me. What was holding me back from experiencing that sense of belonging in this place where we had been shown so much grace and love? Why couldn’t I feel at home when I was being embraced by those I worshiped with each week?

I turned these questions over in my mind and realized that the only thing holding me back was me. I didn’t feel at home because I wasn’t allowing myself to feel at home.

In my mind, I heard the voices that had told me I wasn’t welcome in church any more. Heard the voices that told me that I was a distraction. Heard the voices that told me that I didn’t belong.

Instead of seeing the ways we were being accepted, I kept expecting rejection. I waited for the shame I felt to be reflected back in the words or actions of others. I listened to the voices in my head instead of the voices of those right in front of me.

I wanted to feel at home, so I made a different choice.

When the voices in my head started telling me that I didn’t belong, I started looking for the ways that my church was helping me to belong. I thought about parking lot conversations after services. I thought about late night dinners at Burger King. I thought about hugs offered when we explained why the baby dedication service was too painful for us to attend. I thought of all of the ways that the church I was attending was becoming my church.

And it finally felt like home.

 *   *   *   *   *

424033_10151308414006236_662319879_n (1)“Home Church” was written by Alise Chaffins. Alise is a wife, a mother, an eater of soup, and a lover of Oxford commas. You can generally find her sitting behind a keyboard of some kind: playing or teaching the piano, writing at her laptop, or texting her friends a random movie quote. Alise lives in West Virginia and blogs at knittingsoul.com

Coming Home

I had just been through a broken world experience and was now living in a broken world on account of inappropriate affection that led me away from God and into sin. A father of three, a plastic surgeon by profession, a founder of a major Christian movement in the Asia Pacific region and here was I, trying to put together the pieces to do a ‘make-over’—one that would look real from the outside even if it was still broken on the inside.

I am reminded of the words written by another doctor called Luke who gives a detailed account of the happenings the past nine months must have been for the mother of Jesus of Nazareth when he wrote after the visit of the shepherds in a town called Bethlehem, “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart”.

As each day passes and the year draws to an end, I ponder in my heart what were ‘all these things’ that happened this year that I can treasure and the rest discard. To be honest, I will not discard anything because every ‘thing’ that took place in my life was of my own doing. Some people are good at burying past events but I can never seem to do that. In my field of practice, I deal with scars all the time. Scars do not disappear but only fade with time. They will always be there. But as I recall all that has happened to me, good and bad, right and wrong, I realize that they have been ‘coming home’ happenings that have led me to seek out the plague in my own heart and with folded hands turn to God for mercy and forgiveness.

The Scriptures remind us that God is faithful and will, with the temptation, also make a way to escape, that we may be able to bear it.

Able to Bear It? As a father, as a spouse, as a doctor, as a friend to another, the ability to bear all the scars inflicted this year can be difficult. When patients seek advice for scars, I show them scar tapes, scar creams, lasers, scar gels and the list goes on but as I treasure up all these things and ponder them in my own heart, I know one place where the scars seem to just somewhat ‘disappear’ and that is at Calvary, at the foot of the cross of Jesus of Nazareth. What God does not protect us from, He will perfect us through – Robert C. Frost

In a few days my second son, David, will be coming home for Christmas. Will my three children ever know what this year has been for their daddy? Will I know what the year has been for each of them as their father? But this I do know that we have a Righteous Father in heaven who knows what ‘Coming Home’ means when His own Son returned from Calvary in glory.

As I gather my three children together this Christmas, I have only one message for each of them: Coming Home for Christmas can only bring the fullest of glory to God when we see Bethlehem in the light of the ‘Old Rugged Cross’ at Calvary. Only then can we experience the full meaning of what it is to come home from a broken world and into a world of peace, love and joy where theCharles walking out of Mulu Caves, Sarawak, Malaysia Spirit of God reigns eternal.

It is like walking out of a cave enveloped in darkness and into the dawn of the light of life. Truly a ‘Coming Home’ experience that is deeply engraved in the labyrinth of the soul.

*   *   *   *   *

Dr Charles Lee“Coming Home” was written by Charles Lee. Charles, who lives in Sabah, Malaysia, is a husband, a father, a plastic surgeon and founder of a Christian Discipleship movement called APCOD. He spends most of his time in the operating theatre, playing the guitar or cycling. He blogs at Awaken the Dawn.

 

500 Miles

In need of an adventure and a respite, I googled “Cheap Pilgrimages.” El Camino de Santiago de Compostela was toward the top of the results: a 500-mile foot pilgrimage across northern Spain. For the time involved, it sounded (relatively) cheap and adventurous. Just what I was looking for!  I started making plans.

My plans didn’t include any research or training. At the time, the Camino wasn’t well known in the US (Shirley Maclaine and Martin Sheen have done much to change that in recent years) and the weeks prior to the trip were filled with the tasks of running an active and growing nonprofit and handing off leadership for an extended time. I bought a guidebook and figured I would read it on the plane to Europe.

When I arrived at the train station near the border of France that marks a traditional starting place for the journey, I was wearing tennis shoes, jeans, and had a bulging backpack with several things tied to the outside. With one look at the trainful of German hikers with tiny packs, professional walking sticks and the perfect hiking clothes, I had a moment of sheer panic. My complete and utter ignorance was suddenly evident.

My first days were spent evaluating the contents of my pack and leaving items behind at every stop. I mailed myself a package to “General Delivery” to a post office at the end of the trip, items that I couldn’t bring myself to abandon.  The kindness of the Camino was shown to me as people helped me tend to my blistered and aching feet.  I started to find a groove, both with the walking and the long stretches of silence. The silence occasionally turned to prayer.

There is much to be said about my time on the Camino. But, one of the core lessons was coming to love the interplay of “now” and “not yet”.

I spent day after day walking, following the mostly dirt path marked by shells and yellowWP-Camino-fields arrows and creating a place to rest in whatever circumstances I found myself in at the end of the day.  Some days had familiar faces from past encounters and extra blankets at night; others were marked by arduous mountain climbs and awkward bathroom arrangements. As pilgrims from across the world, we had little in common with each other, bound together only in the decision to walk. My “now” was the path ahead of me, the people who were with me that day, and the decision of when to stop.

My “not yet” was the city of Compostela. As the ending point, it was always on my mind.  I was afraid that I wasn’t going to make it in time to catch my return flight and towards the end, I recalculated every day. I was curious about what it would feel like to be done–would I be relieved or disappointed? I wasn’t sure. I was looking forward to reclaiming my jeans and a pair of sandals at the post office and shopping for souvenirs without the burden of having to lug them across Spain.

Home is similar.

My “now” is Washington, DC.  I’m here but know that it’s a place of transition, a place in between.  There are a few people who have accompanied me who I will treasure and a blur of faces who I won’t remember.  Again, I have too much stuff and have relied on the goodness of others to tend to my little aches.  And slowly, I have found my groove.

The “not yet” is a bit fuzzy. Heaven lingers out there as the capital-H Home that is “not yet.” Prior to that final destination (God-willing!), there is road to travel, a road with prolonged stops, I suspect. Some of the same Camino questions arise in my heart: will I get where I am supposed to be? how will I feel when I arrive? will I remember the little moments that got me there? will I create a place that I know, without flinching, is my home?

Until those answers arise, I just keep walking. Camino-De-Santiago-in-Spain-e1360917612157

A Passage Home in a Passing World

The morning rose as promise quickly succumbed to the extravagance of the mounting sun. Five of my best friends and I were headed west through the high plains near Lubbock under the cracking brilliance of a Texas summer morning. This was the fulfillment of our pact made almost a year before to drive to San Diego and back after we graduated from High School. The road and its rushing welcome beckoned us westward into the long journey that would echo through our lives for the next ten years as we would return again and again to the road together every following summer.

We passed into New Mexico in the early afternoon and found ourselves in the middle of nothingness. Clouds like clots stood against the oppressing light casting shadows onto the speckled desert. Our car passed as a breath through the dry cavity, and in it, the green roots of deep friendships were growing deeper.

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    I often wonder if my home is the road. Upon Texas highways I have experienced more beauty and joy than anywhere else.

The countless sunset drives where every sunset original in its peculiar quality grabs the deepest pieces of me and puts them together. Nights under stars uttering mystery in the tongues of ancient light. Late shadows cast sidelong by trees only glimpsed but caught in my memory forever. Middle of May wildflowers, Bluebonnets and Indian Blankets, painting a canvass of glory just outside a middle-of-nowhere Texas town. The rushing surprise of spring bursting forth in a shade of green I had almost forgotten in the winter. All of these are visions of the road, hints of home in a passing  world, and the passing only makes it sweeter.

Nothing awakens in me the poetic sense of experience more than the road. The road as an archetype signals a new hope, and when I drive, I hope for home.

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    Somewhere along our first day’s drive in New Mexico, we stopped and ran around naked through a boy scout campsite for a while acting as if the world were really all here for us to romp through. This led to a speedy getaway back into the summer evening. When we finally caught our breath and reminded each other what we had actually done, we smiled and began to speak to one another in a new way. The night took us as I drove us west, and each of us conversed with the other slower and deeper.

Night closed and there were no lights. Nothing before us, nothing behind us. There was only blackness and our meagre headlights. Our car was a mere passenger clinging to the two lane road. The space of the car and the 20 feet our headlights pierced in front of us were all we had, yet we twisted through the dark world with joy.

Each head in the car slowly nodded off, and I drove on alone. The deepest darkness I had ever known enshrouded our now seemingly miniature vessel as it forged deeper into the nights mystery. I had never been so alone with others around me. After ten minutes of driving silently and looking around at the void on all sides, I stuck my head out of the driver’s side window and caught a glimpse of the high, moonless, New Mexico sky.

The sky was softly illuminated with a million stars buried on top of one another in the deep ocean of space. Their light was far away, but the stars tangled the entire sky with their white shimmer. I rolled the window all the way down and climbed out of my seat keeping one hand on the wheel as I sat on the window with most of my torso out of the car and my face free.

I drove this way for a moment before climbing back into my seat. The widow rolled back up and the space within was still and silent once again. I looked down at the glowing green clock reading 11:54 P.M., and I felt a wave of exhaustion creep up the back of my neck. The road passed in twenty foot increments as I drove wearily on, and I turned inward to my own deeper thoughts for the first time all day. I was alone, and my mind recalled the weeping nights I had spent on my bed the past year feeling the caving in of my own heart.

We rolled on westwardly weaving our way as a narrow passage of light through the darkness. Above, we were being watched by the infinitely interwoven stars.

Hole in the Wall

I’ve shared room 205 with the same roommate for three years now. Early on, the two of us forged a haphazard sort of system to keep the room habitable. But we’ve never been neat about it. We’re close friends with the girls in the dorm room next door, and the four of us are constantly spreading ourselves out between the two spaces. The unique transiency of college has permeated our way of living, almost subconsciously, and we never seem to be all the way settled in.

I never imagined I would live in a place this messy. The closets in our room perpetually overflow. Empty Capri Sun juice pouches sit on the windowsill. There is a hole in the concrete block wall that we duct tape every year on move-in day, afraid of what would crawl through otherwise. Recently, my roommate’s birthday cake sat out on a plate for over a week, becoming crunchy before it occurred to us that we should throw it away.

My room at home, though, has become even more pristine since my absence. The walls are white and the closet is bare and the trash can is empty. At home, I wake up and am completely alone. But always, after I drive the four hours home and I sleep and wake in my own bed, I am more reminiscent for the noise than appreciative of the quiet. I miss has become the mantra of college breaks.

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Home, for the first time in my life, is a fluid concept, always seeming to be where I am not. Family is even more ambiguous . My family, of course, includes my mom and dad, my brothers and sister, all of whom I deeply love. But if a family consists of the people who know where you are and love you despite it, then my family is also a cobbling of young adults, mere semesters away from dispersal. I still have close ties to the place in which I grew up, but each year they are changing. We are selling the house with the pristine bedroom, and I find myself largely apathetic. It is only a place to sleep.

The place in which I live from August to May is different. It is where life together is made rich and loud and colorful. After we move out, our beloved room with the hole in the wall and the small closets and the overenthusiastic heater will be exposed for what it is. There was nothing intrinsically special about those concrete blocks or the bedframes or the thin carpet; they were only bare spaces for us to learn to fill. They will be passed on to new freshmen, who will peel our duct tape off of the hole in the wall and solve the problem in their own way.

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Next year, instead of sharing a dorm room, we will get an apartment, and we will decorate for our climactic last year together. We will hang colorful shower curtains. We will carry oversized couches up the stairs. We will string twinkle lights and maybe even make our beds for once. We’ll have roommate pasta dinners and Waffle Tuesdays. I’m just as excited as I am apprehensive for this brief, beautiful time together. The more I come to love where I am, the more I believe that it is home, the more it will hurt when the time comes to leave.

And yet, in this moment, this is my family, and this is my home.

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juniors_christmas_banquet“Hole in the Wall” was written by Veronica Toth. Veronica is a junior English major at Taylor University (located in approximately the middle of nowhere, Indiana). She’s grown to love cornfield country and especially the people who live there. She enjoys occasionally writing poetry and always using sarcasm. Veronica is pictured on the far left with three close college friends; they do not keep dorm rooms clean, but they do love each other. She blogs at Tasting Twice.