Face-to-Face

I have an address and a driver’s license in Pennsylvania, now.  Our house in Illinois is sold.  All of the boxes that I am going to unpack pre-remodel are done.  I’ve found a church, the grocery store I prefer, the Y for early a.m. workouts.  I really lack for nothing at this point.  Even Dave’s phone situation is better than we thought and we can talk almost daily (almost as regularly as Zac and Anne when he was in Iraq). 

What I miss is face-to-face conversation.  I talk to people all day long in my job.  Joel is here when I am at home.  I can talk to Dave, as well as our kids and Bunny and Tamara and Sharon and Sara and others on my phone.  But I have had almost no “let-me-get-to-know-you” conversations here.  I can count them….dinner with one of the men I work for and his wife right after I got here, a meeting with the pastor in his office, coffee with a woman on staff at the church who was responding to my offer to volunteer, one of my coaching appointments where the client (destined to become a friend, I think) asked me direct and interested questions about myself, a good connection with someone at a dinner party.  All this, in two months.

I am a willing and able participant in relationships.  I bring much to the table.  I am interested in learning and growing from hearing others’ journey experiences.  I love to have others learn and grow from knowing me.  I am a generous and kind (and, granted, opinionated) woman with much to offer.  Yet, no one seems to be interested in me as a new potential relationship.  This seems very strange to me. 

Dave and I have always been others-oriented.  Maybe that has, occasionally, held us back in our own personal lives and ambitions, but generously giving other people time and money and a place to be when they need it is a life style we have embraced.  We were trained in hospitality early in our marriage (I could give you lists of books and Bible studies and read to you from years of journals).  Now, I am shocked to find that I feel alone in my quest to know and add value to other people’s lives. 

I have not labeled myself as a <recovering> pastor’s wife here.  I do wonder if I did how things would change?  For some, one way- for others, another maybe.  I’m not interested in finding out.  I’m not hiding it and certainly not ashamed of it.  I told the one person who asked about my husband past “where is he?”  I am just simply interested in being a value to others because they find me to be engaging and encouraging, interested and interesting.  

Patience, I suppose.  People are busy.  People have friends and family already.  But we have been made, created, to be relational.  Not dependent, but interdependent, offering and receiving from one another.  Face-to-face with a bit of time invested.  As I wait for the connections here, I’ll stay thankful for the ease of cell phones and I will keep reading–right now, Steve Brown, John Maxwell, Ken Blanchard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Seth Godin, Elizabeth Eliot, a good novel now and then–to be sure I will be interesting and have something to contribute when the time comes.

Narnia, change, “stuff”, and home

Now, life has really begun in PA.  Joel is here with me, we are learning to call our condo “home,” I have not gotten lost once in the past week, and I am still on the same tank of gas that I bought 8 days ago (which means I have found my way without lots of u-turns and back tracks).

Joel’s adjustment to our move is a concern, so on Tuesday, I interrupted my manic approach to unpacking the houseful of stuff the movers brought on Sunday to take him to see the new Narnia movie, “Prince Caspian.”  Even Joel remembers me reading the Narnia books “a lot.”  In fact, what Joel wouldn’t remember is that the very first time I read those books aloud, it was to Dave.  The winter we worked at Keystone Ski Resort, I read the entire series to him as we drove from Lubbock to Austin (Christmas with my family), from Austin to Kansas (Christmas with his family), Kansas to Lubbock (pack up and move), then, Lubbock to Keystone (west of Denver).  I wonder what we did with all our stuff then?  Maybe I remember that we left it in the spare room at the farm?  We certainly didn’t have as much accumulated at that time as we do now! 

My five weeks of solitude and a relatively minimalistic approach to life did not prepare me well for the arrival of our belongings.  The movers just kept bringing and kept bringing.  The good news is that we have gotten rid of a lot.  The bad news is that we are still way over the “necessary” amount.  There are lots of boxes stacked in the dining room here that there is no place for until we remodel the kitchen.  I could live without it all.  There are boxes under our bed (you can buy bed lifters so you can store things you don’t need under it) that I wonder if we need.  I can’t for the life of me figure out how to set up the DVD player and speakers (maybe there is a young man at church who I can hire to do that for me?), but we really don’t need that at all, either.  It is really amazing what we don’t need that we cart around.

At the very first of Prince Caspian movie, Peter expresses the difficulty he has had adjusting back to life as a boy in England after being the High King (the Magnificent) and an adult in Narnia.  Later, after they have arrived back in Narnia, Susan tells Lucy that she isn’t all that thrilled to be there because she was just getting used to being a girl in England again.  Change is not hard.  It’s the adjustment to a new reality that is hard.  Learning to be joyful with an eternal perspective, no matter what the conditions of our surroundings, is a spiritual exercise.  I think I prefer the minimalist approach.  But, there are things in boxes here that will mean something to one of our kids one day.  Our lives are so connected through memories and shared experiences.  Those are pieces of the puzzle of God at work….not to be discarded too lightly, I think.

I have not found this change or the adjustment difficult.  Dave packed up our house on Woodland Glen after I moved to PA.  I just packed up my immediate needs and went away–sort of like a business trip.  I didn’t walk out of an empty house or deal with leaving Sheena behind or drive out on highway 74 one last time.  When Dave is finally here, I think we will share different experiences of leaving and adjusting to a new home.  When he was here to paint and oversee carpet, he said it felt like coming home…..he will be glad to get here in the fall.  I will be glad to have him here.

Joel, after walking to the Water Ice place last night (mango is his current favorite flavor) and into Doylestown’s quaint and friendly downtown, told me as we neared our condo that he thinks he can almost call our condo “home.”  He is going to be okay.  He is fully experiencing where he is and looking forward.