I have a to-do list in my Notes, and the very first item is “finish Mexico blog post.” It’s been there, at the top, for nearly a month now. I don’t know why I do not seem capable of sitting down and just finishing the thing, but alas. I’ve had the most wonderfully restful break here in the snowy little town that raised me, and tomorrow I fly back to Houston. The next time I’m back here, I will have graduated from college and will be a registered nurse. Being back has gotten me thinking a lot about time and how strange of a thing it is. I spent this morning with the moms of two old, dear, childhood friends. We talked some about the years they watched their kids and me grow up, but mostly we talked about all that has happened since then. I’ve been to Bible school and traveled Europe, spent two and a half years as a Baylor Bear, and started and nearly completed nursing school. I’ve dated a few guys and made lifelong friends; become a writer and a learner; taken up rock climbing and rowing; watched childhood friends get married and have babies of their own. And these moms’ kids--these old friends of mine--they’re both going to be nurses and one’s engaged and one is in a relationship with “a guy who is just the most beautiful person and treats her like a queen,” according to her mama. All these things, and many more, have happened and yet...I came back home today feeling as though the years since eighteen have been only a dream. I look back at old pictures--of camping trips and Shasta times and Serve LA and driving over the pass for sports and boating on Suttle and watching stars on docks and in fields and on barn roofs--and I feel like they were taken only yesterday. I have to intentionally remind myself of all that has happened in four years or else I find it all rather unbelievable. I KNOW the friends I made at Capernwray and Baylor and that I’ve almost got a degree and have lived halfway across the country from here for three years now, but when I’m back here all of that quickly fades and I feel as though I should be texting everyone to organize some night games and a good ol’ TP sesh. But then I drop my baby brother off at the high school and realize those who were freshmen when I was a senior graduated TWO YEARS AGO and that I now know zero of the kids inside. And when I stop by the middle school and see that the little toddlers I taught to swim are now sixth graders in Becky’s class...I realize that years really have passed. It’s amazing to me how old wounds can surface after any amount of time. Maybe as a melancholy temperament I experience this phenomenon more acutely than others do, or maybe most of us understand but rarely discuss it. I can go months, years, without thinking of certain people or events that hurt--and I can forgive and move on a thousand times--and still, the cracks in my heart can reopen in a single moment, as if they were fresh just yesterday and I’ve awoken this morning to reality all over again.
I broke down in tears today, "grown up" and alone on my little brother’s bed, over many things and people that have been lost. Over things that once were, and will never be again. Over friendships that were once deeper than family but are now as superficial as strangers. Over unanswered prayers and unrequited love and improper timings. I haven’t broken down like that in a very long time, but sometimes being back here and driving all the old roads and seeing the mountains and fields and fences again makes for a case of profound nostalgia. The truth is, time isn’t really real. Time is told by the seasons and the years, felt and expressed by our physical bodies, but our souls know no time. We were created for eternity, and from God’s view, every day is both yesterday and today and tomorrow. He sees the whole timeline from above; we see and feel from point to point. And so, our bodies and calendars tell us “four, ten, twenty-five, fifty years have gone,” and our souls say “it was all in the blink of an eye.” We are eternal at heart and made for forever. So, physical time doesn’t sit well with us, when we think about it too deeply. Just think: a sand-digger fly’s whole life is five minutes long. A mosquito lives ten days; a monarch butterfly less than a year. To me, a human who could potentially live more than a hundred years, five minutes is but a drop in the bucket; ten days a few blocks on this year’s calendar; a year only two semesters of school. But to that fly? Five minutes is a literal lifetime. An incredibly significant, not-one-second-wasted lifetime. And yet to us, decades whizz by. Old friends who haven’t seen each other since graduation “pick up like no time has passed;” lovers celebrating their 70th anniversary swear “they got married yesterday;” parents watch their babies walk across the graduation stage and think “just last week, they were in diapers.” The truth is, at twenty-two years old I have not prepared myself to watch doors shut, to see friends and family get sick and die, to lose those I love. During childhood, it’s easy to believe that “everything will stay just like this.” All the doors will always be open, the world will always be an oyster, nothing will ever be permanent. But the truth is that, on earth, there is permanence. I’m sure many of you had that figured out long before 22, but that reality is only just now becoming clear to me. I am so thankful I believe in eternity. To believe that these months, days, years are the end-all-be-all would be such a frustrating endeavour. It would mean that wounds that have not healed by the time I die will remain forever unhealed--that some of the wrong I’ve done and not been forgiven for would just be over and done, without resolution. But I believe in a God who is in the business of redeeming and restoring and righting. He has put eternity in our souls--allowed us to feel these aches as time passes--to show us that we have been created for more than a timeline with an end date. When we look in the mirror and see wrinkling skin and greying hair but our spirits feel sixteen and free...He wants us to embrace that disconnect. It’s a disconnect that draws us to Him because we cannot make sense of it and must trust that He can, and has. And, it is true, that some of my friends will be my friends forever. Eternally. I texted Trent, as I was crying, and said: “I’m glad we’re forever friends.” “Forever and ever. I hurt with you.” “Thanks; it’s the best anyone can do.” “It’s a hurt I still hurt.” “We can’t fix each other’s hurts, usually. And God doesn’t usually fix them either. But He’s with us. And, likewise, we can be with each other.” “Just bear a bit of each other’s burdens.” “Yep, that’s Galatians.” “Yep.” “xoxo” “Walk alongside.” “Amen.” And so, as I find time to be such a strange and unreal thing, it stirs a disconnect between my calendar & body and my soul, and that disconnect draws me back to friends and family, and to Jesus. I’m thankful for the assurance of eternity...where broken hearts will be made whole and tears will be wiped from eyes by our God, who loves us and is whispering however softly and through whatever painful disconnects “there is so much more than this...wait, and see.”
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{This post was originally written for, and published at, The High Desert Life. Please see their website for all things Central Oregon. I am a huge advocate for their vision and what they're doing.} “It all makes sense now.” Best words I could ever hear from a friend. It makes sense, now, why I talk about my home all the time, why I can’t get it out of my head or my heart or my soul, why I swear that place and its people shaped me, why it’s the biggest and greatest part of my story and my past. I have said for so long that *I* only make sense in light of the place and people who raised me, and the Jesus who saved and continues to save me. Some dear Texas friends of mine visited our tiny mountain village not too long ago. Mom and Dad picked them up from the airport and drove them down the winding desert roads to our little house in town. One morning, they woke up and followed the directions I sent them to my favorite hike, a few miles out of town and way up in the mountains. It’s the hike I take every time I’m home, with my dear childhood friend Hayley. We always have a year or more of catching-up to do on our way to the top, and we usually continue on off-trail to the base of the mountain, a few miles in the distance. No matter the weather, we take our clothes off and jump in the lake after our descent. They visited “Melvin’s Fir Street Market” and asked for Melvin himself, because I told them that Melvin is one of my favorite people in the world. He’s been the town’s “Health Food Store” guy for as long as I can remember (and for at least a decade before that). I told them they’d love his little store. All kinds of good food. It’s where I treat myself before I go out of town to hike or climb. “On your way back, I’d encourage you to stop in there,” I said. “I worked there a couple days a week for many summers. Everything I know about business and stores, I know from Melvin. We used to take our lunch breaks together and I’d ask him a million questions about how he’s been so successful in such a small town, and he’d teach me things. Anyone in town will know where “Melvin’s” is. They checked into Five Pines, and I texted them some long nostalgic story about how “that area” has only been built up for a decade or so, now. Before that, it was just national forest. We were the only house in the forest (which is now a neighborhood, with real roads and everything!), and Jake and I used to ride our bikes back there, deep into the woods, and find old abandoned log cabin remnants. We’d sift through their foundations and find old Vick’s Vapor Rub bottles–the bright blue glass felt like gold when we’d find one to carry home. Jake would dig up old cow bones and drag them home and leave them in piles in the front yard. And then, maybe ten years ago now, they built a movie theater there among the trees. Four screens. I went on a lot of dates in that little movie-barn. Spent a lot of time there with friends. Before we could drive, someone’s mom or dad would drop us all off and pick us all up, out front. And when Austin turned 16 before the rest of us, he became our honorary chauffeur. I wanted them to see the forge where I learned to change my oil and rotate my tires with my Hayden-friend who gave me my very first Carhart jacket. The forge where I spent many nights my senior year, hammering out a damascus steel rosette for the guitar I spent the year building. It was in the parking lot of that forge, on a blizzardy and icy night, where Hayden taught me to pull my E-break and spin cookies. He’s the same friend who’d pick me up in his truck at sunrise on summer mornings and say “hop in–I’ve got coffee.” We’d bounce down old dirt roads, splashing the burning black stuff all over his cloth seats, listening to old-time country music, and I’d watch him shoe horses. They didn’t have time to make it to the forge, or the high school, or the fields where Dad took me every Sunday after church to hit fly balls so I could “get good enough to make Varsity.” They didn’t know all the fields where we played night games or the trees we’d hide in when we TP’d our town-friends’ houses. They didn’t have time to swing by The Hangar, where I spent every Wednesday night learning about Jesus from Dan Keels, or Sisters Community Church, where I was raised by The Village. They didn't see the elementary school fields, where Dad took Jake and I to fly kites and launch rockets, or The Pumphouse, where I bought my first pack of wood-tipped cigars for myself and my girlfriends one night when we needed them for our bonfire around the lake. They didn’t make it up to Hoodoo, where I learned to ski and spent every winter skiing and playing cards in the lodge for the majority of my life, and they didn’t see Billy Chinook, where I spent every summer wakeboarding and water skiing. They didn’t walk on the dock at Suttle Lake–which I’ve been jumping off since I was six years old, and they didn’t have time to run out to the Metolius to drink from its crystal waters like I have so many times. They missed the chance to run The Bone Trail to Eagle Rock and cross over the little stream that I get down on all floors to soak my parched lips in every time I pass. They didn’t know that Eagle Rock held me as a 6 year-old girl when I was brand new to the town and about to start first grade, and that it’s the first place I ran to when I arrived “home” fourteen years later after having left to see the world and start college in a state 2,000 miles away. They didn’t get to see my initials carved deep in the oak tree at the top. But they got the gist. They smelled the mountain air and felt the crisp mornings on their skin. They noticed that every street is named after a type of tree and that you can only walk two miles before you’re in the woods outside of town. They sat in Sisters Coffee, where I wrote my Valedictorian speech, and I told them there used to be a little tiny house on that property that could only fit about 20 people inside. On cold, snowy winter days, we’d line up outside, all the way down the sidewalk. Dad would bundle me tight, and I’d order a hot chocolate once inside. They got to sleep in the duplex my parents have been renting out for as long as I can remember–and I told them there used to be a little green house on that property. When I was seven or eight, the fire department guys did a “demo” on it while we watched it combust from the park across the street–I sat on the fence rails and Dad stood behind me. After it burned, my parents built the set of duplexes that sits there today. They got to see the mountains that greeted me every morning for 15 years–the mountains where I first learned to backpack in the snow, with IEE friends and leaders. It’s funny, you know. When I was eighteen years old and graduated from high school, I couldn’t wait to spread my wings and fly–to leave our little town for the “big wide world” and get out of the bubble. And here I am, at twenty-two and nearly finished with college. In a few short months, I’ll have a degree and be a registered nurse. You know what I’ve decided?
I’ve decided that I flew far, and wide, for long enough. I’ve decided that the rest of the world has its beauty, and living in new countries and states is great, but there is truly no place like Sisters, Oregon. I’ve decided, Lord willing, to go Home–to the mountains, to my family, and to the little town that has made a little Sisters-shaped hole in my heart. |
hey, i'm jordan.wife to one, mama to four, bible-believing christian. Archives
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