Do you ever have those nights where hours after you’ve gotten into bed, you still find yourself awake, unable to turn your thoughts and emotions off?
That was how I spent my Monday night because it has finally started sinking in that I’m leaving soon. In 20 days, to be exact. I have reached the goodbye stage. So, here is a little insight into my late night thought process:
When we were first assigned out teams at Training Camp, we had the opportunity to get off of the Adventures in Missions campus and have some team bonding time. The first thing my team did was head to a coffee shop. As we sat their sipping our coffee, our team leader Kayla Norwood pulled out a set of picture cards. We were asked to pick a card and explain how it described our identity. I picked this card of tree roots:
When it came my turn to share, I explained that one of the reasons I felt this image described me was because I’ve tied my identity into the people, places, and experiences that have shaped who I am. And, as I’m bracing myself for the goodbyes to come over the next few weeks, I’m realizing just what that means.
As I struggled to find sleep on Monday night, this process of saying goodbye felt much like the storm that rolled through my town last weekend, pulling trees out of the ground so that their roots were broken and exposed.
In saying goodbye, I am uprooting my sense of identity. I’m grieving the loss of my former sense of self as I seek to re-establish my identity in a new context of constant change.
And, as my thought process continued to wander that night, I came back to T.S. Elliot’s poem The Wasteland which had been popping into my head that day. While I hadn’t read this poem since my sophomore year of college in an American Literature course, one particular line stuck with me:
“these fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
As this phrase kept coming back to the surface of my mind, I decided to pull the poem back out and remind myself of the context of that line. In The Wasteland, T.S. Elliot is discussing what he sees as a declining western culture. He longs for the beauty of a culture that he now sees as crumbled and broken, and he seeks to pull together its remnants into his poem as a testament to what it once was.
And, as I thought more about the poem, I realized that I am much like T.S. Elliot. As he assembled together pieces of a dying western culture, I often find myself holding onto the past, resistant to change, but getting dragged along anyway with the passage of time. Digging my heals in as I skid along towards what is next. The day I graduated college was an incredibly difficult day for me. Partially because I was running a fever, but mostly because I realized that it was the last day I would see (or at least see with the same frequency) the people that had been essential components to my identity the past four years. They helped me grow into who I was.
Yet, I am so thankful that I moved forward. I am thankful for each person and experience that has served as a “root” in my life. Because, while I’m entering a season where may not be physically connected to those particular roots anymore, that doesn’t negate their significance—they provided the nourishment necessary for the me to grow.
And, as I learning to let go, I’m realizing that I don’t need to be like TS Elliot clinging to his beloved and dying culture, shoring up the things of this earth, because I know that God promises us better.
So, I cling to the promise that God promises a good result to those who have faith.
At a wedding I went to this past weekend, the pastor brought out two wooden spoons he had made. He talked about the winnowing and sanding process that the wood had to go through in order to become spoons—something that can serve. It is my prayer that I will allow God to reshape and mold me, like a fallen tree, into something new. While the changes I face this year and the goodbyes I will have to say will be difficult, I will come out better for it in the end if I allow God to shape my identity and craft me into something new.
