white blazes

I just got back to Pasadena a few days ago. I’m crashing in my buddy Adam’s old bed and using his pillow until I move into a new place this Saturday. The “Six Man Crew” pad is nearly on Colorado Blv, where the Rose Parade marched by just hours ago.  And so it begins, a new year, a re-engagement with school and a new cell number (616.258.9004).  The journey from Michigan to here was a good time. I stopped off in Minneapolis for a few days and hung with the Diehl crew, it was great, minus Caila getting bit in the face by a dog. We spend our first day together in the ER. She has healed up fine with a stitch or two and a good story. As we sat waiting for the doctor (for hours) we talked about how this is life, and how we are glad to be doing it together—it feels like home when we are in the same place.

Everything seems oddly new. I’m not sure what to make off it yet. I stopped by the café I would current and the menu went an’ changed on me. However, the newness is familiar. Caila and I had ourselves a date for our 16 month, at a pub of all places. But we had never been and it seemed just right as we roamed the quiet town of Sierra Madre. This is my last quarter at Fuller, I have very little to my name, I gave myself a haircut today—I’m feeling nimble in a way I haven’t for some time. Nimble yet planted. My buddy Sean and I are both jumping headfirst into writing projects these next few months, which feels rad and might influence some thoughts that land here. So this is sort of an update, a report of sorts. 

Every moment, every subtle touch and each hellish thought finds placement in the Divine economy. It is subsumed, eventually. And so, it is that our human longings, as shattered as they are, were worth trusting at some deep level. At the vocalization of lament and sorrow, we find God—when the rug’s pull lands us on our back, we have a view to the stars. And maybe I am the pathological optimist, granted, but, death’s door is a stones throw from heaven’s gate. 

Babies are born into the fight, this raging world of ours, and it seems to often a sort of death sentence. From the shopping mall to those living off its waste, death is often dressed up like life. When you get really old you move as slow as when you were born, you unlearn everything, you can barely see and you land back in the hospital, on your back, next to a room where a baby was born just the day before. Life and death are neighbors—they share a wall.[1] Babies and hearses are a stones throw away from one another.[2]

I turn 27 years today. This is late-twenties if we are counting. And age has a way of marking a life, defining seasons and giving description—dark and bright strokes their significance. It is no surprise that with age you grow in thought, slowly creeping in and out of adulthood. You learn the rules the first half of life while the second you learn, not how to apply them, but rather, what it is to transcend them. Rohr talks about both transcending and including this first half of life. The mark of maturity (or better—a realized placement) is that one has passed through to a different view, new perspective, phase, season or general differentiation. In this time, that seems to always come in cyclical patterns—year after year, we get better at identifying the life that the container holds, rather than confusing the container with the life it holds. I have lots of containers, these are the projections of my world that I’d rather live in all to often, sometimes preferences sometimes I use the word ‘tradition’ for this sort of thing. These rugged buildings look like my town, the place I am from and the people, moments and stories that have shaped me. It is a template that encourages me to draw outside the lines, but is a rather safe place. 

Leaving a place helps you see it for what it is. I left California and found that it is a place I like to venture and explore but feel burned, lost, disregarded by the whole thing—as I’m sure many do in a place as transient as L.A. The beautiful thing is that it is a million places at once—a bunch of gardens blooming in a concrete jungle. But, like leaving high school to walk the trail, I can only feel liked but not loved, held but not placed. Monday, I go back. And a lot has changed, in me and in friends. Plenty of death and life have redecribed the landscape. The new contour of a place is what I noticed first landing in G-Rap. I was back in the place I was born, born into the fight of broken hearts and bleeding soul. Community was dispersed, people have died, some are dying to live, but it all felt like a tilted picture frame. The new norm has set in and all the containers seem to be frustrated that I’m finding life beyond their bounds. Maybe this is what it feels like to be sent, your roots trusting better than you that things will be all right taken up into the story of this moment and the next—the death and life, these leavings and returnings being apart of the same plot and passage.

the wick is silently breathing in

it’s afraid to end its humble moment

when light filled the room with praise

And the calm clear orange fluttered in space

oh vexing brightness time not concerning

you bend with the wind and collect at the heights

giving what you must and what we all see

exposing the depths and the ways we might be

decorate the sounds,

and dance the rhythms that send you…

beyond these shores,

into what you don’t know no more…

I told my counselor that I wasn’t sure how to end, say good-bye and leave Michigan this time around. When I moved a few years ago I was under the belief that I was just saying a see-ya-later-kinda-good-bye to everyone. Turns out, when you move, you loose contact, people continue on and things are never the same. This is how life goes—it flows on with and without you. So, reentering the stream this fall has been wild: old-time moments with folks who get me, new people and deepening friendships that have only bloomed these past few years. It’s taught me loads about how community works.

And so, this next week I leave Michigan with no plans to return, it feels weird. I need to say good-bye, not to a Mitten but to certain flesh and blood peoples that I love—deep in my bones. The intensity I think I owe them would be nothing less than sitting them down, looking them in the eyes—noticing the contours in their face—and telling them about their significance, the stuff they are made of. Its this stuff, their lives, that has encouraged me into open space. Just yesterday, however, the tables turned. Greg, my former youth pastor came in to work to say good-bye to me, it seemed really significant. It caught me of guard, perhaps because it was a real good-bye—one I felt. The distance, the encouragement and the significance of someone going out of their way to bless you, its a sending—but its an ending. I had told him about a job I turned down, that would have kept me in Michigan, but also, how I felt God’s frustrating tug to continue on the path I’ve been trekking out west—and he got it. He didn’t run through the pros and cons, the what ifs of the world, just got it. I felt sent by him. Kind of like when I sat down with my friend Matt years ago and he helped me see that Fuller might be my next right step. There is no right or wrong, no ledgers in these moments—just two people in a peace of mind and off someone goes, the end and the beginning happening at once, good friends pushing off from the same land toward distant shores.

I ran into a friend that is moving to Chicago this week. She was at work and I just happened to show up on her last day. The employees had made her a cake and were lined up saying good-bye telling her she should get off the floor and go eat cake, like-ya-do your last day at work. It all seemed really significant, the ending and the sending.

Now, some might say that with technology and blogs and cellphones and cars and Skype your really not saying good-bye, but I think that is bullshit. I give this excuse when I rather not feel the fabric of friendship rip, the sound being unbearable. The truth is, you leave and you land, but you have been redefined—and so have they. Your clan sends you and you either return a man or you start a clan somewhere beyond the territories of your kin. Abraham left to start a new family, and those of us who are not making babies, and stuff, start communities that work similar. But it all begins with, not so much being willing to leave (to adventure some place extreme), but in the ending and the sending, a certain kind of peace is enabled to lead us to a new land. 

Several months ago I was going through one of the hardest times of my life, things felt crushing and Caila made a doorpost banner, from wood, that had the Hebrew word shalom and a passage from Isaiah 43 written in the letters. On the back of the thing the shema was written, that says something about writing Scripture on your doorpost. There is a lot to these verses, meaning and metaphor, I look at them everyday. I leave my room under this banner of peace, exodus, hope, justice and other big ideas that play themselves out in the everyday happenings of life. But I leave to return, I enter this space like a cathedral in time to rest and think and wonder. The doorway, however, is also a passage and entryway to the unknown and mysterious world in which I tread. We all tread lightly these days, afraid of the dragons that be abound. But I am, convinced more and more, that we might just be better off treading firmly and facing the dragons—naming the the chaotic powers with presence and love that redefines space, the landing of our lived existence.