The thing about monumental life shifts is that they often bleed into the rest of life, they become the rest of life, really. These past eight months have felt outsized, somehow taking up more space and time than they contain. It hasn’t felt as much like a routine turning of the seasons, but rather, like a slow-motion catastrophe where the weather continues to change around this one, fixed point.
I’m so sorry to say, I’m (still) talking about church.
It feels like years, not months, since everything was “normal”. It has eaten our lives like a picnic lunch. Our bones are picked clean.
I’m actually going to say more about this in next week’s email. For now, I’ll just say that in spite of the confusion/sadness/loss/anger/grief, there’s a small part of me continuously surprised that I (mostly) feel okay.
When we were in the thick of deciding what to do, I remember telling close friends that I wasn’t sure how I would survive driving past the building multiple times a day. “It will crush me.” It turns out, it doesn’t crush me. It hasn’t once made me cry. Sometimes, I drive by and half-forget that it’s not still my church home. Sometimes, I feel anger bubble to the surface. Sometimes, I feel wistful, remembering our Monday night Bible studies and how our kids lived their own unique experience and made memories apart from us within those iconic, church-musty walls. Sometimes, I notice the upstairs lights were left on, and I remember we no longer have a key to pop in and turn them off.
And so it goes…
What remains true is that this still lords power over my emotions, like it or not. Which brings me to a few weeks ago.
There I was, walking home from my shift at The Window, my work backpack strapped to my shoulders, ten pounds heavier than it had been that morning. I had a loaf of work bread in my free hand, a podcast in my ears. It was unseasonably warm, a butter sun tall in the February sky. I walked through downtown, crossed the chaos of Pike Street, waited on a train. I followed my shadow back into our neighborhood. And when I stopped for this selfie in the two-way glass door of the beloved church that broke my heart, I smiled, just a little.
When Spring arrives early, everything feels possible, even healing.
Short story long: I climbed the porch steps, checked the mail, and found an unexpected, unkind letter from the church. My good day evaporated. Poof.
Over the next couple of hours, I flailed through a haphazard series of responses that helped me regroup. Only in hindsight did I see that they actually helped.