facebook now has a feature of sharing your 'memories' by reposting
posts from years past. today it gave me a blog post i'd written five
years ago about our move to uganda. and that gave me pause.
pause about time. pause about choices. pause about change. and not change.
five years ago we had just received our housing assignment at the university where we would be living. it was a wonderful house with a lovely yard and a front porch where much of the living happened. because we were on a university campus, we didn't have a fence or a gate, our yard ended where other's yards began. there was a lack of privacy, an openness of community, that honestly i had a hard time getting used to. people walking up to greet and chat when they saw me on the porch, was not in my comfort zone. people waiting on the porch for our return was not part of my normal. i longed for boundaries. i longed for space to call ours. i longed for protected places.
five years ago, i couldn't explain why this need screamed at me, and i carried a lot of guilt about my desire for privacy. i judged myself for not being more adaptable, more culturally sensitive, more willing to embrace and learn from this communal atmosphere. but now as i look back on my memory, as i look back in time, at choices and changes and things that don't change, i see more clearly what i was desperate for. i was trying to find myself in the middle of my life in a new place. i was trying to find where i began and where i ended, in a significant way.
i had come from a house in atlanta with a front and a back porch. the front porch was where i drank coffee in the morning while my babies played at my feet. the front porch was large and screened and looked out on a small front yard with a giant water oak tree and the street. in the morning the porch was a place of transition- from sleep to waking, from home to world. an entrance to the day. the back porch was for the close of the day. the retreat. the back porch was off the kitchen and high up in the trees because the house was built on a slope. the back porch was both open and protected. screenless but not accessible from the street, surrounded by tall water oaks that bordered our sunny yard. the back porch was where i drank a glass of cold white wine at the end of the day and wrote out the process of life that happened in the time from the front to the back porch. it was sacred. it gave me space and it gave me time. time and space i didn't even know how much i needed. who i was in those years of baby boys and zoe derailing and life changing decisions like stopping a career to home-school her and moving our lives to africa, became blurry. who i thought i was, who i wanted to be, became scrambled up with assumptions of internal consistency and external labels. outwardly i could describe myself fairly well, i was a 40 year old doctor who was in a season of home-schooling her eldest child with special needs and responding to her husbands call to missions in africa. but internally i was very confused, and internal confusion is not my specialty. internal confusion if unable to be sorted, was to be abandoned, and external identity was to be embraced and worn proudly.
five years ago i packed up our lives and moved across the world with a fairly superficial idea of who i was, unbeknownst to me. landing in africa was perhaps the place i needed a back porch more than ever, at least metaphorically. i needed space and a place to do the work of understanding myself, in the middle of my life, with life looking very different than i thought it would. the combination of a need for that space and reflection, while adapting to a new foreign communal culture, was harder than i realized. the competing desires to separate and define, and to integrate and define, added to the internal confusion of who i was and who i wanted to be. i craved my back porch, a glass of wine and an uninterrupted hour, but what i actually longed for was to continue the process of finding myself in the middle of a life i didn't sign up for (as if life ever is) and didn't know what to do with. what i was searching for was my sense of self- a self that was intact and strong enough to fare all weather and location. a self with internal stability that could stand true and wear the external things with out depending on them for identity. a search that took me to far and dark places that i didn't know i had.
five years have past. we live in a lovely house off campus in the city. our compound has walls and a gate and even a guard. no one stops by uninvited. no one waits for us on our front porch. this house only has one porch- a back porch. my days start and end on this porch. my babies aren't crawling or toddling around, they are playing air-guitar, and instead of three there are four of them. i'm again sitting on my porch writing, but writing from a place that is more than a porch. writing from a place of having braved the internal confusion and growing in the understanding of self rather than abandoning that which is hard and messy inside. a place of finding myself, where i begin and where i end, no matter where that is, no matter who is derailing, or what the calling is. a place of returning to old truths made whole. a place of newness and unity. a place where one porch is enough for mornings and afternoons, for beginnings and endings. a place where i no longer fear the external exposure and vulnerability of the front porch, because i now welcome and hold my own internal exposure and vulnerability. when you are safe inside, the outside is less threatening.
i'm so thankful for space and place, for reflection and growth, for time and change. i can now say,
"the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, i have a beautiful inheritance." psalms 16:6
pause about time. pause about choices. pause about change. and not change.
five years ago we had just received our housing assignment at the university where we would be living. it was a wonderful house with a lovely yard and a front porch where much of the living happened. because we were on a university campus, we didn't have a fence or a gate, our yard ended where other's yards began. there was a lack of privacy, an openness of community, that honestly i had a hard time getting used to. people walking up to greet and chat when they saw me on the porch, was not in my comfort zone. people waiting on the porch for our return was not part of my normal. i longed for boundaries. i longed for space to call ours. i longed for protected places.
five years ago, i couldn't explain why this need screamed at me, and i carried a lot of guilt about my desire for privacy. i judged myself for not being more adaptable, more culturally sensitive, more willing to embrace and learn from this communal atmosphere. but now as i look back on my memory, as i look back in time, at choices and changes and things that don't change, i see more clearly what i was desperate for. i was trying to find myself in the middle of my life in a new place. i was trying to find where i began and where i ended, in a significant way.
i had come from a house in atlanta with a front and a back porch. the front porch was where i drank coffee in the morning while my babies played at my feet. the front porch was large and screened and looked out on a small front yard with a giant water oak tree and the street. in the morning the porch was a place of transition- from sleep to waking, from home to world. an entrance to the day. the back porch was for the close of the day. the retreat. the back porch was off the kitchen and high up in the trees because the house was built on a slope. the back porch was both open and protected. screenless but not accessible from the street, surrounded by tall water oaks that bordered our sunny yard. the back porch was where i drank a glass of cold white wine at the end of the day and wrote out the process of life that happened in the time from the front to the back porch. it was sacred. it gave me space and it gave me time. time and space i didn't even know how much i needed. who i was in those years of baby boys and zoe derailing and life changing decisions like stopping a career to home-school her and moving our lives to africa, became blurry. who i thought i was, who i wanted to be, became scrambled up with assumptions of internal consistency and external labels. outwardly i could describe myself fairly well, i was a 40 year old doctor who was in a season of home-schooling her eldest child with special needs and responding to her husbands call to missions in africa. but internally i was very confused, and internal confusion is not my specialty. internal confusion if unable to be sorted, was to be abandoned, and external identity was to be embraced and worn proudly.
five years ago i packed up our lives and moved across the world with a fairly superficial idea of who i was, unbeknownst to me. landing in africa was perhaps the place i needed a back porch more than ever, at least metaphorically. i needed space and a place to do the work of understanding myself, in the middle of my life, with life looking very different than i thought it would. the combination of a need for that space and reflection, while adapting to a new foreign communal culture, was harder than i realized. the competing desires to separate and define, and to integrate and define, added to the internal confusion of who i was and who i wanted to be. i craved my back porch, a glass of wine and an uninterrupted hour, but what i actually longed for was to continue the process of finding myself in the middle of a life i didn't sign up for (as if life ever is) and didn't know what to do with. what i was searching for was my sense of self- a self that was intact and strong enough to fare all weather and location. a self with internal stability that could stand true and wear the external things with out depending on them for identity. a search that took me to far and dark places that i didn't know i had.
five years have past. we live in a lovely house off campus in the city. our compound has walls and a gate and even a guard. no one stops by uninvited. no one waits for us on our front porch. this house only has one porch- a back porch. my days start and end on this porch. my babies aren't crawling or toddling around, they are playing air-guitar, and instead of three there are four of them. i'm again sitting on my porch writing, but writing from a place that is more than a porch. writing from a place of having braved the internal confusion and growing in the understanding of self rather than abandoning that which is hard and messy inside. a place of finding myself, where i begin and where i end, no matter where that is, no matter who is derailing, or what the calling is. a place of returning to old truths made whole. a place of newness and unity. a place where one porch is enough for mornings and afternoons, for beginnings and endings. a place where i no longer fear the external exposure and vulnerability of the front porch, because i now welcome and hold my own internal exposure and vulnerability. when you are safe inside, the outside is less threatening.
i'm so thankful for space and place, for reflection and growth, for time and change. i can now say,
"the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, i have a beautiful inheritance." psalms 16:6
