27
Bright, Shiny New Things

During the early months of 2012, Ryan and I began to dream of starting over. A real starting over. We knew it was time. It had been a year since Addison Road ended; we were on the heels of our ten-year wedding anniversary, which felt monumental; and within our tight-knit community group there was a sense that we were all being led in vastly different directions. New jobs. New states. New babies. New life stages. Personally, we sensed our season of waiting was over, and although we weren’t exactly sure what came next, we knew it was time to make a move. A physical move. In May, we decided rather impulsively to move away from Texas for the first time in our married lives. We based the decision on the fact that our lease was coming to an end. Not exactly a divine booming voice that one might expect to guide such a decision. It was more like a holy hunch than a divine decree.

And sometimes it is like that. God doesn’t always tell us exactly where to go next or what to do when we get there, but He allows us the freedom to explore and bravely take a giant step in the direction we feel drawn. If I wait too long for God to part the heavens with a divine decree, I might forget that God has already given me one: choose life that you might live.1 Choose, He says. But I am often tempted to forgo the gift of free will because it is easier to follow orders and mandates than to dream, to choose, to go. Our move to Nashville was based on a holy hunch, not a specific revelation. We made the choice to step into a divine mandate that had been given by God to His people a long, long time ago—we chose new life, that we might live.

I had been in Texas since I was nine years old, and Ryan had never lived anywhere else. We needed a change of pace, a fresh start. A place that didn’t look so much like the desert we had been living in. A place that physically represented the new life we were stepping into. We decided Nashville was a good fit. We already had friends living there, knew the names of most of the major highways, and knew how to get ourselves to and from the local Target. So really, what else can a woman ask for?

Our friends and family in Texas threw us a huge going-away party. We sat around the pool in Texas, sipping wine and dangling our toes into the water with friends from childhood, Sunday school teachers who had loved us well, our bandmates, and our tight-knit community group. And my heart suddenly ached. What are we doing? And why? Am I brave enough? Is moving really necessary? Mild panic set in.

I was so ready to be out of the season of waiting, but leaving it felt more uncomfortable than I ever imagined it would. I kind of got good at the whole desert thing. It was all so second nature, living in the unknown of a broken life. Was I ready to be well? Was I whole enough to function like a normal person? What if I got to the new place, the place on the other side of the in-between, and I hated it? Or it hated me? Could I make it in a non-deserty place—say, Boston? Would I even know how to be well?

Sometimes we are in the in-between for so long that we don’t know how to leave. We’ve lived without an exit strategy, without vision for a future that is healthy and whole, and leaving somehow becomes harder than staying. The desert has become our friend; the waiting has become our home. Why venture out into a bright, shiny new place when we have become really good at the whole living-in-the-dark-like-a-bat thing?

For a brief moment, I was leery of new life the way I am leery of the mall kiosk lady who has a special array of lotions guaranteed to melt all my thigh fat away. I want it to be true; I really do. But then it seems so far-fetched. And really, I have gotten used to my thighs! I even have a different wardrobe to work around those thighs! I am comfortable where I am. Why risk it?

And I found myself at a going-away party, bidding farewell to an amazing group of friends and family and years’ worth of memories, and I was terrified to move out of the desert and into new life. Absolutely terrified. I didn’t want to go away. I was really good at the desert.

My childhood friend Rebecca came and sat next to me, dangling her toes in the water. She had gone through her own journey of becoming and had recently returned to Texas from a two-year stint in Colorado with her husband and sons. They, too, had left the only home they had ever known and ventured out into the great unknown. She, too, knew the fear of jumping headlong into new life. I waited for her to quietly whisper that it was okay to stay put and that she had hired movers to unpack me just in case I changed my mind. But what she said instead opened wide the gate for new life in my heart.

“Jenny, you will be amazed at how giddy you get over the grocery store. Every day you will discover something new. The gas station. The local coffee shop. A park for Annie to play at. The neighborhood library. Everything will be new. Everything will be exciting. For the first year you will swear you have never been in a grocery store so good as the one you are in. You are going to LOVE it. I am so excited for you!”

It never occurred to me that what I was walking into was going to be an exciting adventure. That new life could be, well, life-giving. Bright, shiny new things.

If finding bright, shiny new things feels like it does when I clean out the back of my closet and discover the vintage coat I forgot I bought at Goodwill last season, I know it will feel good. If it’s anything like finding an old letter from a friend in a shoe box, discovering twenty dollars in an unused purse, or happening upon the perfect, hidden nook at the library . . .

anything like the first day of sixth grade with freshly sharpened colored pencils . . .

anything like the opening day of an Ikea . . .

anything like the first kiss that mattered . . .

anything like holding my newborn baby . . .

anything like memorizing the way she sneezed and how her tiny breath felt against my chest . . .

If it feels anything like that, it’s gonna feel good.

For the first time in years a window was cracked wide open inside of me and sun flooded the dusty corners of a heart that had learned to live well in the dark.

“When the time is right, the cocooned soul begins to emerge. Waiting turns golden. Newness unfurls. It’s a time of pure, unmitigated wonder,” Sue Monk Kidd says of the emerging season.2 She and Rebecca were both right, of course. We gawked at the mountains (hills) that lined the horizon of Nashville like city walls. Annie marveled at the red and gold leaves while Ryan and I fumbled through our first fall—entranced by darkness that covered the city at 5:00 p.m. each chilly, November night. One morning we found ourselves at a pumpkin farm! Not in the front lawn of a church or grocery store, the way we found pumpkins in Dallas, but on the back of a hay-covered wagon bringing us deep into fields where thousands of orange balls grew wild. We lived in awe and wonder; it was a season of pumpkins and peace.

There will be a moment, and you might well physically feel it, when someone will crack a window and you will startle. The bright light blinding your eyes. The fresh air strangely loose in your tight chest. The feel of wind—not sand-whipped and desert-scorched, but spring-made, sweet and dancing through your hair and across your face like a new breath from heaven. And it won’t occur to you to be terrified. You will not decide to be brave or not. You will just be brave. You will welcome it. The sun and breeze and sweet smell of flowers. The light. You will put fingers on dusty windowsills and tears will course their way down your cheeks as the sun warms a face that has not seen pure light in far too long. And you will cry tears of joy. For the sun has come. It has finally come. And your heart will soar.

That is how you know you are leaving the desert and coming upon new life.

Excitement begins to bubble at discovering the new thing that you were once terrified of. You are no longer grieving. No longer burying. No longer wallowing in the lostness, wondering if you will ever leave the desert. No longer wondering if there is another side and if you will ever get there.

You are on the other side, or very near there. There are glimmers of light, hope, promises, and new life. Even the spaghetti aisle feels full of potential.

Today you will peek behind a bush. Tomorrow, turn over a rock. Eat a little more manna than you have previously rationed for yourself. Because it feels like you might be getting closer to civilization, and that means a stockpile of manna. So today you rejoice and eat two pieces instead of one. Soon there may even be milk and honey. You begin to live out of abundance again. Today you dream about the future in a way that you haven’t. You open wide the possibility that you might be happy again. You might love again. You might have a house that doesn’t burn to the ground and might not be cursed after all. You are brave enough to dream about filling that house, that life, with things that matter. Dishes, a coffee pot, picture frames, friends. New friends you will meet on the other side, in a place that brims with sunlight and shiny new things. Old friends, ones who always stood watch while you walked the in-between. You will bring them in, unafraid of the what-ifs.

There is no longer a possibility of new life.

There is new life. Coming in tiny moments of unforeseen beauty, grace, laughter, and love.

Each day you will discover something wholly unknown to you before, and you will dance through the discoveries with the awe and wonder of a child. A million little moments of awe and wonder cobbled together form the road to new life. It’s less like winning the lottery or stepping into a windfall of inheritance and more like recovering, a slow healing. I’ve yet to wake up and realize that I have walked into millions of dollars, but I’ve woken up to realize my limp is a little less limpy.

Soon, the burying, lostness, and waiting will be the memory of a place where you did really hard work with a gracious and faithful God. You will pick a day to remember it, to pay tribute to the long road traveled. But it will be, for this new season, only a remembrance, because now there is newness. No longer in the desert, you will wake to find you are smack-dab in the middle of something beautiful and new.