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It’s been over a month since I’ve landed on the shores of
America. A year overseas does something
to a person, something simple yet undeniably profound. It’s as if your glasses get removed and
throughout the course of your travels, God places a different lens in front of
your eyes and you begin seeing everything the way that He sees it. It wrecks you. It ruins you.
It scares you. It infuses you with
joy. And it changes you.
My sister and I went to see the Curious Case of Benjamin
Button the other night. There’s
something he says in there that really resonated with my being, so much so that
I remembered the line without even having to think about it. After being away from home years on end,
Benjamin returns and says reflecting on it, “the thing you notice about coming
home is that nothing has changed. The
only thing that changed is you.”
And so I’ve changed.
I’ve written about this before but it’s just never an easy
thing to really deal with. Each day that
I wake up I’m faced with another harsh reality of my past staring me in the
face. As I go about town running errands
and such I see those old familiar haunts.
Whether it’s that particular table at Starbucks I always sit at, my
favorite restaurant, or that hole-ridden booth in the corner of the Vagabond –
there’s something about it that I can relate with.
It’s as if I’m staring at the remnants of an old life.
Everything has memories attached to it, memories of an old
self and an old man who was a seeker, a sojourner of hope in what he deemed a
hopeless place. And it’s slightly
difficult to not want to embrace that spirit because when I sit in that booth
in the back of the coffee shop, it hovers over me and it tempts me with what I
once was.
It seems alluring.
To clothe myself once again with my past is the most
seductive thought at this point in time.
I just want to… just once for memory’s sake. Yet something holds me back… and it’s the
hope of a better future.
I’m at crossroads and I’m at that place where I get to make
a choice: I get to decide what I’m going to become. It’s not that God’s predestined it and it’s
not that I’ve only crafted it myself. I
choose every day I wake up to pursue my dreams of radicalism, of adventure, and
of faith.
There’s something interesting about the remnants of this
past that tempt me though – they’re threaded into the core of who I am. They’re a piece of me.
Remnants are what they use to make quilts.
Each of us are holding remnants of a past, but it’s not
necessarily a bad thing. Each day we
wake up and each step we take we’re establishing remnants on our life’s
quilt. Our quilt will one day blanket
us, intertwine with the fabric of our being in such a way that the world will
see our journey.
And so my quilt’s getting bigger and it’s starting to
overwhelm me. I’ve been a lot of places
and I’ve seen a lot of things. There’s a
remnant from that conversation with homeless Danny at the Vagabond; there’s a
remnant from the time I held that baby until he fell asleep in my arms; there’s
a remnant from the day that I jumped off a cliff; there’s a remnant from the
day that I returned home and embraced my mother for the first time in 11
months. They’re almost countless.
Life’s full of remnants.
How’s your quilt looking?
