In my worst nightmares I'm always falling.
Sometimes I'm pushed off a tall building, or a gorge ledge gives way from beneath me. In others, I'm strapped to the seat of a roller coaster car, staring down from the top of the first drop and realizing the tracks extend to infinity. I think if Lucifer were to design a personal hell for each soul, something that was physical representation of eternity away from God as understood by the human mind, mine would be eternal free fall.
When we were dating, Matt and I got into an argument on this point. He wanted to go skydiving for a birthday or graduation and I flatly refused to go. What started as a joke ("don't you love me enough to jump out of a plane for me?") ultimately became a bit of a heated discussion. I like to think that I would take a bullet for my husband if given the choice between his life or mine, but to this day I'm not sure I could willingly jump off of a platform into nothing. I'm told that after the initial acceleration the jump feels less like falling and more like floating on a column of air. At some terrifying moment, the amount of air pushing against you is equal to the rate at which you are hurtling towards the ground, and at that time you can catch your breath and look around and wonder at the miracle of life...that is until you start wondering if the chute will work when the rip cord is pulled.
I find myself these last few months in one of the longest falls I could imagine. Among the many lessons and blessings from my Grandfather's death at Christmas has come a new wave of uncertainties and fears about our life here in CA. I was just starting to get my feet under me, it seemed, when out of nowhere one of the most solid things in my life--my family--was threatened, and ultimately changed forever. What surprised me was not the initial shock...for I knew it would feel like the ground had given way beneath me initially. What surprised me was looking around 5, 6, now 8 months later and realizing the atmosphere is still hurtling past.
Changes form a line and silhouette the questions and uncertainty I still feel.
In March, changes out of anyone's control made my employment "part time" at best, with great hopes but no firm promise of gradually moving to full time work. 2 weeks later I got a call from one of the other 2 offices in town...a full time position with permanence and the chance to work with kids again. A tug-of-war between loyalty and common sense, God's provision and my plan, smart choices and hurt feelings was fought for days, and yet it was clear: another change was upon us.
Our sweet pastor and his wife announced in May that they would be stepping back, making way for a new pastor, a 30 something and his family who were youth pastors in the LA suburbs and moving back to her childhood home to shepherd our flock. And as much excitement as this brought, I realized I had somewhere along the line become comfortable in our church body, we had found a way to serve and felt we were growing, and now it all might change again.
Even the sudden loss of my childhood dog, Tucker, in May left a feeling of great loss, and greater injustice. Saying goodbye over Skype to one of the great representations of my home and my childhood felt like one step too far. When will life cease to change? When will things be "normal" again? When will I find my way back home?
The answer, of course, is never.
It fascinates me that I have to continually learn this lesson: the only constant in this life is change. There will never be another yesterday, and returning to the past is like holding the waves on the sand with a 2x4. Even were I to return to Illinois, to my home, to my closest friends, change would be all the more evident. My life, I realize, is and always will be a steady fall through the old and into the new.
And then, out of nowhere, I feel my weight come up against something solid in mid-air. The lift of the racing, changing world is stronger somehow than my lack of control. And I have found with some surprise recently that there are moments in the midst of it all to glance around and feel, I daresay, comfortable. Like yesterday, when I picked up the phone at work to dial Matt and punched in the area code 760...failing to connect me to the same 217 number I have been dialing for 7 years. Or today, when we walked into church and face after face approached with a hug and a smile and a knowledgeable question about our lives. Or last month when Matt said "I feel like celebrating" and we knew without clarifying who we would call and where we would go for good food and great conversation. Or early this summer when we welcomed our new pastor by unpacking clothing into drawers and said thank you to our old by moving furniture. And I realized, suddenly, as I watched their eyes and their actions, that for the first time in a while I was the "unchanging" part. We have become established here in Cali, and a full year has passed without us even realizing it. My emotions still remind with frightening frequency of all that is "unsettled," and yet there are those close by with even less stability. As my arms have been flailing about in the past months, they have met others, and we have grasped at each others elbows, forming a falling star-shaped mass of bodies, a solid structure which has no choice but to follow gravity closer to the ground.
As life moves along, layers are inevitably added to the silt of our banks. And while we feel exposed and afraid when we are first deposited, time will slowly but certainly cover and then imbed us in the newly familiar. What I may call a passing event, even a reminder of my solitude, today may be a cherished memory in a year.
I continue to question, I continue to ask for a calling and vision here. I long to feel that I am rising to a purpose rather than surviving a breakneck fall. Yet how else will my faith be tested and strengthened? When my feet are solid beneath me and the pathway is clearly marked, there is no incentive, no need, to draw on a higher power. But weeks and months of uncertainty, of taking another breath and another step and dreaming another dream--that is the place where God's might can buoy me on thin air. That is a place where I will learn to value the lives he has drawn around me. That is a place where I will see new possibilities not as lofty goals I must trudge to complete, but as exhilarating possibilities that I am blessed to experience.
For the first time in many months, I am learning to view the past year not as a challenge I have (somehow) survived, but as preparation for what is coming. Perhaps our purpose here in Cali is not clear because I am not yet able to dream big enough, to imagine far enough. Perhaps stepping out of the plane into the vast unknown was just the first step in clearing my head and my heart of the familiar, the solid, and the certain.
I can hear the spirit whispering, faintly audible above the roar of the wind in my ears. As I sit under the teaching of my new pastor, as I form new relationships that I realize are going to last, as I work in a new and inspiring environment, now and then I feel resonance in my soul. A shimmering sensation of expectance which is oddly similar to that "stomach dropping" feeling just before free fall.
As if to say...the time is coming. As if to say...you haven't seen anything yet. As if to say...don't you dare close your eyes.
As if to say...buckle in, and hold on tight.
