Some Personal News

Buckle in

Nate and I have been inviting friends into some personal news for our family, and today we made the decision to invite the general public into the news as well.

Some of you know that Nate’s contract with DFW airport (where he’s worked for eleven years total, four years remotely since the beginning of the pandemic) ended in December. We knew the end was coming since the time we moved here, but they kept moving the goalpost out in order to keep him, despite them ending their remote-work period three years ago. We saw every six month marker as a gift and received it as such. But some gifts run their course and this one did, ending in December. We assumed it would be fairly easy to find another remote position, but we were wrong.

In the midst of this, I shared with some close friends and their encouragement to us was to pray about whether God has us to stay here. I was surprised because moving hasn’t been on our radar at all. We have moved cross-country four times in our near-decade marriage and we thought we were done. We broke down the boxes when we moved here, our version of “burning the ships.”

But a job wasn’t the only thing missing. I don’t write about this much because when someone says they’re struggling to find a church, sometimes those who have church homes in the same locale take umbrage with why we don’t choose their church and I just don’t want to get into that right now. It’s fraught, okay? We haven’t had a church home in four years, since we moved here. And we feel it. Every week we feel it more.

Despite not having a church home, though, being apart from the trappings of church-culture and evangelical uproars and Christian nationalism and social justice warring, things got stripped down to the essential Jesus and that has been very good for our family. Very life-changing and beautiful.

But we still want a church home and family.

If you will indulge me this interruption, I want to share a bit of an adapted piece from The Understory below. You’ll see why after.

It is often said that John Muir hated the word hiking and preferred the word sauntering. From a conversation between them, Albert Palmer records Muir as saying, “I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains, not hike!” Muir follows up the comment with an etymological explanation of the word saunter, which, as best as I can find, comes from Thoreau’s famous essay “Walking.” Thoreau himself probably learned it from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary definition of the word from 1755. I myself prefer Thoreau’s phrasing best.

Thoreau wrote that saunter is “beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds.” Thoreau goes on to say that some might say that saunter is derived from the Latin sans terre, “without land or home,” which might mean having no particular home or, in a sense, being at home everywhere.

Which is it? I don’t know, but I rather like both.

On the side of a road in the Adirondacks, I park my car, stash my water bottle and small nature journal in my day pack. I tuck my pant legs into my socks—less a fashion statement and more a defense against the Lyme-ridden ticks that are becoming more common in this part of the country—and cross the threshold into the green haven.

I am here to saunter, to move, to stay still, to wander, to idle, to rest, to be at home. I am here not to judge where I am but to receive it, such as it is, as the gift that it is. I am here not to make a home in this forest or this place or this moment or even this me but simply to be where I am as I am, to be at home in my own self and in the Spirit, who is also in me.

It is said that St. Augustine coined the phrase solvitur ambulando, meaning “it is solved by walking.” Today I endeavor not to solve or resolve but simply to move from here to here to here. My endeavor, at its basest, is honesty, to notice what I notice and not pretend to notice more or less. To receive what I receive and not make up what I want to receive or what others have received before me. It is to live in the truth of this moment.

I have felt more shame than I know how to hold for my transience, for my lack of roots and rootedness in both places and ideas. Even if no one ever said it aloud to me, I feel the judgment that comes when I move to yet another home, or change a perspective, or learn and shift and grow out from a place where others knew me once, or die to a certain way of being or becoming or belonging. I question sometimes whether I am trying to escape and scorn myself for it, but then I remember a poet’s words: “Why should a man be scorned, if finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?”

Can we be imprisoned by ideals and communities, churches and friends, leaders and institutions? Can we grow out of them or away from them? Can we say to ourselves and others, “This is not the most important thing in my world anymore; it is not the space in which I can grow anymore” without demonizing them or them demonizing us?

I wonder why we find it so uncomfortable to maintain relationships with those who have sauntered to goodness elsewhere and found it. I wonder why we feel we must be the ones who grab on to them and hold them back, what we think it says about us when they move away from where we are. I once heard Duke theology professor Norman Wirzba say that our work as Christians is to “liberate others into wholeness,” and I have never forgotten that. Some of us might blanche at words like those because we’re afraid that one’s liberation into wholeness says something about the space they leave behind in our own lives when they leave.

But another’s wholeness doesn’t have to mean our brokenness. There is room enough in this world for everyone to become whole.

On the surface, I envy my friends with roots and rootedness, those who have never left the cocoon of their family and hometown and geographic culture, or their faith tradition and way of life. But beneath that sliver of green, I don’t envy it at all. The truth is that, despite my attempts to root and find and make and stay in a home, I am not sure God made me that way. I have always been looking for new horizons and new places to explore or inhabit, despite the evangelical obsession with staying still and digging in.

The tension with which I wrestle here is not especially particular or even special. It is a feeling of being out of place, lacking, missing something essential. There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which means a longing for a place or experience. The Portuguese have a word for this too: saudade. The Welsh use hiraeth. Perhaps the closest we come to it in English is nostalgia, but nostalgia conjures up images of longing for the past, while all the rest of these words convey a longing for that which has not yet come. This is how I feel about most of life. I do not look behind me and long for any of it, not anymore. But deep within me there is an unshakeable, steady hope for something completely new that works in ways the old never has.

Perhaps that is what the New Testament Christians would have called elpis, “to anticipate and welcome.”

I am growing even more sure—despite what years of apologetics and local churches and dogmatic doctrines have told me—that this desire for change doesn’t make me wrong. It is not always the moral choice to stay and the immoral choice to leave. What is the moral choice for one may indeed be the immoral choice for another. This is a difficult tension to live with, but live with it we must.

Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking.

We do not grow by staying exactly the same.

And others do not grow by keeping us always with them, exactly as we and they always were.¹

I suspect you know where this is going.

Nate has begun applying for jobs elsewhere. The more he’s thought about it, the more he knows in his heart he desires to work with a team, not necessarily remotely. We've pulled out the familiar matrix of what our family prioritizes in a place to live, put thumbtacks on the proverbial map of the US, opened the Zillow app and listened to podcasts from local churches, reached out to friends who live in those locales or near them. We’ve communicated to our closest friends and asked for their feedback. The feedback has been generous and positive, especially when we mention the places we’ve considered.

Some say, “But the Little River Cottage? The river? The Adirondacks? Won’t you miss it?” And the truth is, of course I’ll miss it, but I have received it all as a gift and never want to horde gifts. It will all be a gift to someone else. And I will receive the next gift.

Someone called this home a companion to me recently and I thought to myself, yes, that is exactly what this place is, a companion. She has been the very best companion to me in some of the darkest four years of our lives. Remaking her from the ground up has been some of the best work of my life, a constant reminder that resurrection is possible. More than anything, this place itself has been a place of death for me, but our home has been a place of companionship. I write about that a lot in The Understory and don’t want to say much more right now about it. I also want to say I am not sad anymore. In our four years here, I’ve grieved hard, buried deep, dug back up, made peace, put to rest, let what is dead decompose, and I’m not sad anymore. I have learned it is solved by walking and sometimes it is solved by walking away.

That is not something a lot of Christians like to hear. They want resolution and restitution and reconciliation at all cost, but that’s just not the example I see of Jesus or Paul or John or Abraham or Ruth or Rahab or Mary or Joseph or pretty much anyone in the Bible. I see people who put their ear to the ground and followed Jesus into whatever and out of whatever at a moments notice.

(Are you still reading? This is long, I know.)

Nate and I are moving. We don’t know where (though we are prioritizing the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area in job searches) and we don’t know when (as soon as he gets a job offer) and we don’t even really know why except to say this, we have done our best to be all here and now it is time to be not here anymore.

We have been hesitant to share this openly because news can spread like wildfire and some people like to speculate about details, but ultimately that was about us trying to control something that isn’t within our control (namely other people’s opinions and mouths). And the reality is, job offers often times come because of a personal connection, so if you happen to live in the RTP area and know of a position available for a Business Intelligence, Data Analyst, let us know, and if he applies, we’d welcome a good word from you. It feels vulnerable to say these things aloud, but we can’t receive if we don’t open our hands.

So much love and gratefulness to you all. I know you will receive this news with the same tenderness in which it was written.

1. Adapted from Chapter Ten of The Understory, © Brazos Press