Conversation Point

This Place for Today

Packing is arduous business.

Finding myself relocating to a new city means participating in the age-old, time-honored practice of pulling up stakes, shutting off utilities and looking ahead to another part of my life as it unfolds. The packing is simply the physical rendition of sorting and filing memories, moments and hopes that evidence the truth of the time spent in any place we choose to call home. Having done this a few times before, I am familiar with the process, its delights and its pitfalls. Gathering one's life together, releasing its unneeded portions to the universe, fitting the remainder into a box on wheels and trusting it will be intact and ready to be welcomed into a new space at the other end of the road, is both an act of will and faith. This move calls forth a good measure of the former and a greater measure of the latter than any other move has required.

My mother's family started their journey in this country in upstate New York in the early nineteenth century. Eventually making their way through the Midwest, my great grandparents met in Iowa in the latter part of that era and continued their travels to Minnesota by way of South Dakota. My mother remembers that they returned to Iowa each year to help with the cattle drives, the women running the chuck wagon to provide home cooked meals for the cowboys. Their son carried on the tradition, moving his wife, son and daughter through Wisconsin and North Dakota before settling in Chicago. When my mother speaks of where she grew up, it is Chicago she remembers as home. While I know my grandfather moved his family to accommodate his work, I am not sure why his parents kept to the road for so long.

But what their movement across the land tells me is that they were strong people with dreams, willing to withstand endless days walking next to covered wagons containing their whole lives to the frontiers of a place completely unknown to them. Each generation pushed a little further West, following a hope for more than what they had or could envision for themselves where they were. What few pictures I have of these people I never met reveal great beauty and joy so poignantly real I can feel them with me, directing me to take my part in the adventure. The unknown didn't seem to phase them, which is a gift, like their faith, that they have passed down to me. My people are people of faith, courage and abundantly joyful creativity, an ancestry of which I am proud to share, a legacy I hope to embody with grace.

The heat of these last days spent in this place that has been my home for seven years also reminds me that I am not carrying out an Exodus journey of Biblical proportions. There will be no hot desert winds on my face or burning sand under my feet, no blazing sun relentlessly beating down on my head with each passing minute, hour or day. There is an address to which I am headed, unlike the Israelites, who would wander for forty years with only the hope of God's assurance that there would be a promised land.

There is progress in the journey. Years later Isaiah would go on to speak of a new Exodus for God's people, a journey to a new Eden-like place. "For you shall go out with joy, and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the briar shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign which shall not be cut off (Isaiah 55: 12-13)." Sometimes what we can't see immediately is as important as what is within each task and step of the day. Within the tangible moments of living are housed the grace and mystery of God's purpose and promise. Herein lies our home, wherever we are.

posted by Cory L. Kemp @ 5:52 PM