"Of course this is Jordan's hometown. How could it not be? It all makes sense, now." "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.
My very dear friends, Trent and Sarah, arrived in our tiny mountain village last night. Mom and Dad picked them up from the airport and drove them down the winding desert roads to our little house in town. This morning, they woke up and are following 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 dearest 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'll visit "Melvin's Fir Street Market" and ask for Melvin himself, because I told Trent that Melvin is one of my favorite people in the world. He's the town's "Health Food Store" guy and has been for as long as I can remember (and for at least a decade before that). I told them they'll 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, id 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, if you ask." Tonight they'll check into Five Pines, and I'll text 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 Vix 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. A few summers ago, Marteen and I sat outside at the brewery across the street and had a beer together. We'd spent many high-school evenings on "friend dates" there, discussing life--the good, the bad, and the ugly. So it only seemed fitting that we'd grab a brew on that patio as grown-ups, too. Gramps, Nana, and I stayed in one of those little lodges a couple summers ago, the weekend Jacob graduated. When Jared graduates, we'll be all together as a family--at HOME--because Sisters is finally home for the Richersons, again. I'm not sure it ever wasn't. Sometime this weekend, Mama and Dad will take them out to Cloverdale and show them around--to the house and the property in/on which I was raised and painstakingly decorated with Christmas lights each year. They'll get to see where I raised my donkeys and chickens and bunnies; where I started my career (and business) as a swim-instructor at the ripe old age of thirteen; where I kissed a boy or two and cried over a few more than that. They'll see the big driveway where I (gladly) ran garage sales and the barn where my baby bloodhounds were born and my kittens were raised; the pool where Huck drowned and the dirt beneath which so many of our beloved dogs are laid to rest. I want them to see the forge where I learned to change my oil and rotate my tires with my handsome 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. He'd take me riding, too. I'm not sure they'll get 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 probably won't know all the fields where we played night games or the dam-wall where I had my first kiss or the trees we'd hide in when we TP'd our town-friends' houses. They won'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 may not 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 won'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 won't see Billy Chinook, where I spent every summer wakeboarding and water skiing with gal pals and a boyfriend and family friends. They won't walk on the dock at Suttle Lake--which I've been jumping off since I was six years old, and they won't have time to run out to the Metolius to drink from its crystal waters like I have so many times. They'll miss 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 won't know that Eagle Rock has 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 won't see my initials carved deep in the oak tree at the top. But they'll get the gist. They'll smell the mountain air and feel the crisp mornings on their skin. They'll notice 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'll sit in Sisters Coffee, and I'll tell 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'll get to sleep in the duplex my parents have been renting out for as long as I can remember--and I'll tell 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 on the property today. They'll get to eat lunch at one of my favorite (and dearest) places, and they'll see the mountains every morning. They're going to love it. I'm so glad they're there.
6 Comments
The trees have a lot to teach me, to teach us. It was on my way home from church this morning--from church way out in the country, where I joined a friend I met a month or so ago at a conference...when a lot of Things were Different. Some Christian radio station was playing in the background. (I switched off 1989 last night because my already-muddy mind needs a little break from all of Taylor's lyrics (read: all but 3 songs on the track) that mirror the current state of my life.) I wasn't really listening to the music, though. I mean, I wasn't listening at all. I was Thinking and praying and Thinking a lot more. And I was trying really hard to offer up some words of Thanks amidst all the Thinks because it's gospel-fact that there is always something to give thanks for, no matter what Life is doing to us. I was struggling, though. Which is unsurprising because a Lot feels like a struggle right now. My Thanks felt mundane--obligatory--rehearsed. Come on, get your heart into it, dear girl. Try to see through The Fog. And then I looked up. At the trees. Oh, the colours! In one single branch there were yellow leaves and green leaves and red leaves and purple ones, too. I kept driving--bound to get home and be Sad for a while longer--and then I flicked my left blinker instead and whipped a U-ie at the next light. I pulled up beside the colourful, leafy giants and stopped. Right in the middle of my lane. There were a couple of cars behind me, and they just moved over. I figured they would. Breathtaking. I took pictures. And stared. s I pulled away and continued my little drive home, in the Sunday Sun, my sulky heart tuned into the song on the radio: You're making me new Making me new, Everything new I've been changed by you Like only love can do You're making me new And I thought, yes. That's what the trees were telling me: That being made new is a process. That we are saved by grace and then Jesus keeps working in our lives--constantly. We are not made new in an instant, and we cannot expect those we love to be made new instantaneously, either. Patience, Love, I heard. See those green leaves? They're old. They haven't yet changed to red. And the red ones haven't yet come into their Yellow Glory. But they're all together on one branch. All three colors in the same place. The Old, the Changing, and the New united on one front. There is beauty in the process, Love. There is beauty in the patience. You must learn to be patient with your friends. You must learn to be patient with the Boy. You must learn that each person you love is on a journey of their own and though you may wish so, change does not happen over night. Patience. Jesus said to them: "My father is always at his work to this day, and I too am working." It's that present progressive tense: working. Continuing action. Something going on now. Jesus is working and reviving and making new--presently. I was saved once and am continually being saved and will be being saved until the end of time--and the same is true for all of us who have uttered our humble YESes to the One who is Love himself. And so, there are still a lot of Questions in my head. I'm guessing a lot of them will probably never be sufficiently answered. It seems that's the way life works, when you pour your heart and soul into loving People. Some parts of our lives and the lives of those we love are just...silent. Like some parts of words. Rene Denfield once said something like that. But what I do know is this: though I may not see fruit budding from the lives of people for whom I deeply care, God is working. The Spirit doesn't lose its grip, and though a person's journey might look fairly round-about to me and though the journey may not bear fruit when I think it should (really, what do I know anyway?) I can rest in the fact that God doesn't desert his children. He works and he works and He just keeps working. And in the same way, the Old Me and the New Me can (and should, and do) exist simultaneously...on the same branch. Though I may feel my mind is muddy and uncertain and though I may not be able to figure out why I can't shake certain Things or Certain people, God says: I am working. He is okay with the Old and the New existing together, in the same place, because He knows that change can be slow coming. That sanctification is a life-long process. That I am on a learning-growing-changing-holy-making journey that is exactly that...a journey. What I can know is that I have been saved and am being saved from Myself daily and hourly and minutely. And so are the people I love most dearly. So, I guess, when I look at the life of someone (anyone) for whom my heart aches and don't see "progress," that's okay. God never told me I'd be the one to see progress. Instead He said, "some sow, some water, some reap." And He said I won't find the reward for which I yearn here on earth--that I should yearn only for the possibility of being rewarded eternally with the words "well done, My good and faithful servant." He has asked me to be faithful; to be steadfast in prayer; to be anxious for nothing; to forgive seventy times seven; to have a broken heart for His broken people; to look deep inside myself and recognize my own sin; to, at the same time, Know I am saved and live in that Freedom; to Love well; to invest deeply, even knowing that deep investment often means deep pain; to carry the burdens of my friends; to love my enemies; to do Good to those who have wounded my heart; to speak truth and be honest but to do so with a heart of Love and not a heart of condemnation or pretentiousness. And in all that, He is asking me to be patient. To be patient with myself and patient with my friends. Patient with those who have been long in my life and with those who I've known only for a short time. And to be patient with Him--because though I may be used as a tool (and oh, the honor of that!) I am not the one doing the changing. That's God's job. And His timing and words are far better than mine, anyway. And after a sunny walk with a dog and two best pals, there is some clarity: You can't change people--because you can't change a heart. Only God can do that. All you can do is speak truth, love well, and be thankful you serve a God who cares enough about you and your friends to intercede into individual lives and change hearts, at all. Look at the trees, dear Girl. They're telling you a story. They're telling you the story of your own heart...and they're telling you the story of the heart of the one for whom your heart is breaking. Of all the ones for whom your heart breaks. Let Time be used by God...and watch, and wait, and pray, and wait some more. Someday (and maybe not until That Day), all the leaves, on all the branches, will be Brand New. Your job is only to pray for that change--to love yourself and others through it--and to keep your eyes wide open to See it happening, one leaf at a time. One leaf at a time. I think it's time I try Seeing that way. {originally published here, around this time last year}
|
hey, i'm jordan.wife to one, mama to four, bible-believing christian. Archives
November 2022
Categories
All
|