Not By Fire

We are away this weekend.

Being away from our home is a freedom that I don't fully understand. Not a freedom I think I want to indulge too often, but a freedom that I notice myself enjoying more and more deeply. Our home is a sweet, warm, safe place and I can't think of anything better for small people. But it is also a small space, physically and in most other ways. I feel the walls of it all too closely sometimes - who we are allowed to be, how we're allowing to live and play and think and pray - the smallness of it can be more oppresion than cozy some days.

Away, we are some of our favourite selves.  The alchemy of it is all mystery, but it is sweet goodness and I'm thankful for it.

We are with friends who love us, and that of course helps. We are with friends who tend to us and feed us and that helps too.  Our kids are enjoyed and included and we are enjoyed and included and that feels like all kinds of rich.

So we are away and we can be more of a part of ourselves we don't get to be all the time and we feel rich and really, is it any surprise that I like Away?

This blog is named after a collection of correspondence between myself and a friend Darla, written in our 20s when we were Away.  We were away from our childhood selves, away from our parents, away from home.  And we were enjoying a freedom to figure out who we might turn out to be.  We are both lovers of words and Words, of ideas and thinking and God. We both love good penmenship and good pens. We wrote longhand epistles to each other over the course of a few years that were so, so deep and so, so shallow, as only 20something women can be.  We of course had to name the collection: what other than The Shallow Abyss?

Today I joined her and the people who are her church to celebrate the baptism of her son. She leads this group of sweet wonder in weekly togetherness - her church was full of Jesus bumping into Jesus. There are not hundreds of people and narry a computer or Power Point slide. There was just a collection of folk who thought togetherness was a good way to experience God With Us on a Sunday morning and on this particular morning they wanted to especially let sweet Felix know that God was With Him too.

In a happy turn of happenstance a co-friend from our heady missionary-seminary days was also there, and I got to sit with one who knows me and knew us and feels like home when I'm Away. And we listened to yet another woman's reflection on the Word and it was short and right and good and full of True and my heart did one of those drops from a height that lands in my belly and leaves me breathless with All Is Well.

Between the baptism and the celebration of the baptism, I wandered through town with Katie the co-friend and she asked the right questions while I puzzled about the gap this time Away reflects in my Home.

The woman who spoke this morning, Gretchen, said so many words my heart said yes to and part of it was that Christianity isn't meant to work (she was quoting from the Reluctant Christian blog).  It offers us a lens to see, but not a tool to use. Jesus is asked to just say who he is, and he says Watch who I Am but we can't see it because we're waiting to see something else altogether. But there is a grace that lets us see that in fact Jesus is.  And today we believed together that Felix could receive that grace as a still-frustrated-not-crawling-baby and grow up to see not What Fixes Everything but our God who shows up in faith and service and hope.

Somehow, going Away brought me home.