By Brooke Chavez
I haven’t been able to write through the holidays. Not because I haven’t wanted to, Lord knows I’ve had more to say in the last several weeks than will ever find its way to a page. But life has come at my family hard for two solid months and like walking through a dark place you don’t stop to think about where you are going, you are just feeling your way through.
Life has changed for me – for all of us. The individual paths that each of us are walking have laid parallel for so long. Now they have reached a crossroad and we are all going in different directions.
My family has always been close. Each of my siblings is grown now and we each have our own little family but even still, we have huddled close to our childhood home. My sister married a dear friend of our family and moved across town. My younger brother married my best friend and for a time worked at our family’s home church. My older brother received Christ last year and also lives nearby. My husband and I live on my parents farm, taking care of the animals and running the business.
We spend our holidays together and squeeze in as many family breakfasts on Saturday mornings as we can. As I write this we are all vacationing together in a huge beach house in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This is the third or fourth time we have spent a week on a beach in the middle of the winter and so far every one of us still love it.
I admit I am a helpless nostalgic. I treasure my moments with those I love, and a grip tighter as they seem to be slipping away. Which is exactly what is happening.
A major family crisis has taken my older brother away from us for a time and left us to pick up the pieces. My younger brother and his wife have just announced their plans to relocate to the west coast. And in the midst of the chaos, God is telling Pablo and I to pack up our home and go.
Go where?
Go everywhere.
Beginning with Mexico. Then the Race. Then who knows.
I once asked my dad while we were on a family road trip how long before we went back.
“Don’t you like seeing the country and doing all these fun things?” he asked me.
“Yes, but I’m ready to go home now.”
My homebound, nostalgic little heart is breaking up into pieces right now. But, lest you think that I’m writing this through tears, there is another emotion mixed in, and that is hope.
God is taking each of us to different places. We were together for a time and for a purpose, and now its time to spread our wings; walk our own path. We are like Frodo’s little fellowship that would tear itself apart if not for each member going his own way to his own purpose for the greater good of all.
There is something wonderful and good about this kind of pain. A song I love expresses it like this: that you can find “beauty in the broken”. I have the overwhelming joy to know that each of these people that I love so much are following the same God that I serve. We have the same goal though a different role to play.
Yesterday I hugged my brother and my sister-in-law as they left to catch a plane to the next journey God has for them. I don’t know when we will sit at the same table again or sleep under the same roof. I don’t know when we will be together at Christmas or play guitars together, but it doesn’t matter.
I have so much beautiful, overwhelming joy in this pain – no – because of this pain. It is like glimpsing a beautiful golden ray of the sun poking down through storm clouds. It was always there, but you only see its beauty through the perspective offered to you by your circumstance.
When seen in this way, life is beautiful. Everything is beautiful.
