It's strange to be back here, with the cursor flashing at me, waiting for words. I don't really feel like I have words to offer, if we're being honest. I'm back home for the weekend, but my weekend is almost over. In what I'm sure will feel like no time at all I'll be back in the car headed a little farther north to the place I call my new home. Being back has felt different than I thought it would. I've realized over the last few years how much people really put a place in to context. A city can feel entirely different based on who surrounds you. And now, this place where I grew up and went to college has changed again. It's crazy. I guess it's a good thing. If a place stayed the same forever it might make it difficult to ever really know if you are where you should be; if each time you came and went you slipped right back in to how things were before I think there might be a great sort of confusion. It's like an old pair of pants that have already been worn in. They may have holes or stains, but when you put them on after wearing a new pair that has yet to learn your curves, it makes you wonder why you ever let them go. There's an ease to slipping them on. It's like that, I guess. If every time I come home, it fits like that old pair of pants, better and more comfortably than my new home, I think I might leave always wishing I didn't have to. But this place has changed, and not for the worst, just in a way that helps me to know I am where I am supposed to be for now. There are moments, though, when I wish I could pack this place up like that old pair of pants and bring it with me. I do love this town.
I was writing to Him about change this morning. This is some of what we talked about.
"There are moments when I can feel my heart start to pound. Life moves and changes so fast. Babies grow in to toddlers, and in what seems like an instant, they are graduating from college. I know it can't be stopped or slowed, and it's good that it can't, but there are moments, Lord, when I would like to press the pause button. I would like to freeze time and preserve a moment or a season. And the only comfort I have found in this is You, Lord. Because if there are moments here and now in this broken, imperfect world that are big enough and beautiful enough to stop, to hold on to for a while, then how incredible eternity with You will surely be. How sweet to never run out of You, to have no need for a pause button, or reason to worry of the time slipping away. You are forever. You are bigger than what this earth can hold, greater than time itself."
