East Pole Coffee Company

IT’S FALL, and I’m grounded from flying and traveling for work for a few months. By choice. By invitation from God. Though I’m not sure what I think about that.

Over the last seven years of this career, I have racked up miles in the air like a professional, which, according to my status with Delta, I pretty much am. I love to travel. I love seeing places and being places. I love flying.

Travel has always been one of the best parts of my job. But about a year ago, I felt God whisper to me, “You’re going to want to be home next fall.” It felt like an invitation from Him, and with time in prayer, for me and my team of employees and managers and agents, we decided that I would spend fall in Nashville. What? Fall is my busiest time of year—conferences and events typically keep my travel schedule fully booked in autumn. And God wanted me off the road? But I heard what I heard and I agreed to obey. And so as I write these words, here I am: grounded.

For a change of scenery, I drove south from Nashville to see my family and I’m posted up at my favorite Atlanta coffee spot: East Pole Coffee Company. It’s bright and beautiful, and it looks like it seats about thirty people. In the corners, there are green plants hanging from the ceiling, and the vines are dangling down to the floor, almost camouflaging the electrical outlets. The coffee bar is made of a long and dark maple, and there are these really lovely scalloped white tiles climbing from the white floors to the bar.

I’m sitting with my back to the windows. I like the hubbub of a busy coffee shop, and this one has constant traffic. Also, across the room at a little table for two are my cousin and his wife, who are home from abroad for just a few weeks. I like being able to see them in the same space.

I have a chai with oat milk (which, come on, milk made of oats is ridiculous and hilarious and so bougie but also delicious). The playlist I found on Spotify is a collection of instrumental classics called “refreshing pieces,” and I’m switching between it and Jon McLaughlin’s instrumental music. Still, all I want to do is slam my computer shut and escape. As I was driving here, my mind started dreaming of all the places I could run to and drive to and fly to and be right now. All the other places but HERE. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that even if I did run away, there is no getting away from my insides. It’s as if the sadness has taken residence, and it’s not going to be left behind just because I leave.

And leaving isn’t an option right now anyway. I’ve stopped traveling for work for a couple of reasons, one of them being my physical health. A few months ago, I started getting migraines on almost a daily basis, and I was almost guaranteed to get one every time I flew on a plane. After months of this, my doctor put me on bed rest. Two full weeks of bed rest.

The decision to take the second half of the year off the road was sealed before I started getting daily migraines, but God knew. He knew before I did that the winter would be the winter of migraines and that a full fall calendar probably would have continued to feel invasive. While my body and heart would have been up for it, I worry my brain would not have. But there’s lots more to this season off the road. I know there is.

At the start of this season, my friend Matt asked me how I was feeling about being grounded. Matt and I have similar personalities and he told me, “Don’t be surprised by a sense of mild depression in this season.” WHAT? THAT IS NOT WHAT I WANTED TO HEAR. But even his short message whispered something to me that I haven’t been able to ignore. It amplified the chorus that had been singing in the background of my brain for the last few months, leading up to the season of no travel, so quiet it was barely audible. But when someone else called out the lyrics, I heard them clearly: There is something scary to me about months at home without anywhere to go. I haven’t done this in almost a decade—been in my own house every night of the week for a lot of weeks.

Fast-forward to spring 2020. If I had only known that just a few months later, we would all learn what it would be like to spend endless amounts of time in our own homes as we collectively experienced the beginning stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the first global pandemic of our lifetime. Everyone at home. No one in school or church. Most professionals no longer going into the office but working from guest rooms and couches and dining room tables. Some friends of mine thrived; some did not. We began to ask big questions of our world but also big questions about ourselves.

What happens to me when I can’t go? When I can’t get away from here?

Truth? I wish I were flying away right now. This has been a tough year. It included migraines and heartbreak and quarantine and really hard decisions. And as I think about all those things, something makes me feel like being in a different city would feel better. (It wouldn’t. I’ve done this—tried to fix my problems by hopping on a plane—enough times before. But the whisper is still there. Run from this and you will feel better. But I won’t feel better. I never do.)

How often do we call escapism “fun”? That’s the real question for me. When I’m looking to define fun in my own life, to figure out how to handle the thing I don’t know how to handle or how to process the pain I don’t know what to do with, I wonder if I’m actually planning fun or just using fun to describe running away.

Today, I want to run. I’ll pack a bag with my stuff and a bag with my feelings, then I’ll leave the feelings bag behind, grab the other one, and board a plane that will fly me somewhere.

Anywhere.

I FEEL LIKE I’m a good person to tell you about fun and to tell you why you absolutely need fun in your life. For those who don’t know, I am the host of a podcast called That Sounds Fun. Episodes release twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, and in every episode, I get to interview a friend or someone I wish I were friends with. Sometimes they are authors or musicians, and other times they are chefs or athletes or actresses or doctors or anyone who says something I think my listener friends will love.

Because we do need fun. We all have to find it. My friend Emily P. Freeman and I will often tell each other to “chase the fun.” Whether your life looks exactly the way you thought it would—financially, spiritually, emotionally, relationally—or one or more of those categories feels out of sync with what you thought today would look like, fun is an integral part of what God has in store for you.

And the pursuit of fun will actually bring you some of the answers you hope exist, answers to some of the deep questions rooting around inside you.

A weird thing has happened to me since people started listening to the podcast. When people come up to me in public, whether it be at the airport or in a restaurant, at a coffee shop or at church, they often tell me what they do for fun.

Because we always talk about fun on the show. At the end of every episode, I ask each guest the exact same question: “What sounds fun to you?” And because listeners hear me ask that question twice a week, they want to answer it too.

It’s hilarious, really, how much we want to talk about fun. I usually have to interrupt people and ask for their name because they are so quick to tell me their story that they forget to tell me what their parents put on their birth certificate the day they entered the world. So I stop the friend, ask their name, then tell them to continue. And once we’ve finished the conversation, their next question is “Can I tell you what I do for fun?”

And my answer is always yes.

Because I love fun.

WE FEEL SOMETHING lacking in our lives. We sense that this place in us that used to be filled just isn’t anymore, even on our best days. It may just be a squeak sometimes, but other days it is a roar in our ears that something has been lost and we don’t know how to find it and won’t be able to find it. But we miss it. Because we know it used to be filled.

What is that thing? What are we missing that makes us feel its loss? You think I’m going to say fun here, and while that isn’t wrong, I’ve realized that it’s actually too simple an answer. But you know that, don’t you?

You know that like I know that because it doesn’t matter how hard we try or where we look, we can’t seem to find that thing we’ve all lost. That buzz you get from a glass of wine won’t get it back. His hand around your waist, while it feels awesome, doesn’t return to you what you’ve lost. Even the best day lined up from start to finish still leaves you wondering if it’s all going to crash down around you tomorrow. Because that thing, whatever it is, is still missing.

I saw a video on Instagram the other night (when I should have been sleeping) of an outdoor event where multiple massive games of Jenga were stacked on tables beside each other. You know the ones I am talking about? Where each Jenga piece, instead of being the size of a finger, is the size of a forearm. They were set all up and down two sides of a sidewalk in the middle of a grassy knoll. They were stacked and being carefully played by multiple groups of people. Everyone seemed to be having a great time playing these large versions of a fun group game. Suddenly, a college-age girl ran by the camera and shoved all five Jenga stacks, sending pieces flying. A drive-by (run-by?) destroying of everyone’s good time. In the video, a woman screamed and people threw their hands in the air and everyone was super frustrated that they were playing a game until this girl came and crumbled everything.

After I watched that video, I couldn’t fall asleep because I kept wondering if a cosmic version of that was going to happen in my life the next day.

I’m not here to tell you to carpe your diems. That’s not the solution. To me that is just the other side of the same coin, asking where to find the thing we have lost and what’s the quickest way to escape from here or fill in the gap of what is missing with anything we can find.

I think the truer statement is that what we have lost is real. That thing we know is missing is no joke. It’s legit. While the world may look at your life and tell you that you have everything, you know the quiet, nagging whisper of truth. We have lost Eden, we have lost peace, we have lost the foundation upon which genuine fun can be built. And we have to go search for it.

SO THAT’S WHY we are here. That’s the journey I’ve been on in my own life. A journey of sobriety (in more ways than you’d think), a rapelling trip into the depths of my own pain, a search for understanding. I thought I was writing a book about fun, but I realized we both need more than what that could offer. We need a way to find hope, to believe what we have lost can be found.

I think it can. But only if we will go where this story asks us to go. We cannot be afraid here—or at least, we cannot let the fear win. Let’s all be brave, right? If we have to walk into our pain on the way to Eden, then so be it. Let’s rebuild a foundation that used to exist just under our feet, so we can add layer upon layer of the good stuff, the heartbeats, the loud laughs, the tears of joy. Because, this won’t surprise you, that sounds fun to me.