April 2013
JJ’s Market, Nashville, Tennessee
As a sophomore in college (and for most of my college career), I loved spending time in the offices of my campus ministry, the University of Georgia Wesley Foundation — it felt cool and trendy and Christian. (You’re welcome.) A campus ministry is a church for college students set on a college campus, and with so many of my youth group friends also attending UGA, every day I stopped by that building was like a homecoming of sorts. Along the walls hung photos of mission trips from past years. One day, I stood in front of one of those pictures — a group of college students clumped together in a sunflower field. The sun was shining on their heads, almost making the curly blonde girl look like she was glowing. Across the bottom it read “SCOTLAND.”
I had heard of Scotland. That was about it.
During a Wednesday night service at Wesley that fall — just weeks later, really — the mission trips were announced for that school year, and I saw SCOTLAND as an option. Yeah, I thought, I wanna stand in that field and take that sunflower picture to hang on the wall of the Wesley Foundation.
It wasn’t superspiritual. I knew the Bible said to go into all the nations and share the gospel (Matthew 28:19), so it was more about picking from the list of trips that would be offered for the interested students that semester. I prayed, I remember that. But there was no huge SCOTLAND banner flying outside my bedroom window or any other weird signal from the heavens on this one. I just knew I wanted to go on a mission trip, and that was the one that stood out to me.
So I signed up, and within weeks, our team met and started making plans for the trip.
I grew up going on short-term mission trips (one to two weeks) and I always loved them, but I never felt like I was going to be a full-time missionary. You know, I hate being hot and dirty, and my idea of camping is making s’mores in the fireplace . . . in my house. I thought missionaries needed to be tough and rugged and willing to live without the internet. That wasn’t me. So this trip, two weeks in length to a British country, felt very Annie. I loved the idea of going to a place that was chilly and had Starbucks and spoke English and needed to hear about Jesus. There was a great need to spread the gospel and a great opportunity to partner with ministries already doing that around the city of Edinburgh, and there was the challenge of raising enough support financially to go on the trip. We worked and raised money and prayed and packed, and before I knew it, finals were finished, I was halfway through my college career, and I was heading off to Great Britain.
In May 2000, the plane landed at Edinburgh Airport, and though tired from travel, I wanted to keep my eyes wide open. We drove to the flats owned by YWAM (Youth with a Mission). The ministry base was in Leith, the northeastern seaside area of Edinburgh, and it was where we would stay. I took in the sights and the jaw-dropping beauty of the green hills and old buildings. We walked from the base to the docks and picked the only open restaurant for our dinner spot. I had rhubarb pie and totally hated it.
For the next two weeks, we spent time ministering in Wester Hailes, a poor neighborhood just outside of the city center (or centre, as the Scots spell it). Helene, the ministry director, spent time educating us on this unique community and gave us opportunities to hang out with them. We did VBS-type camps, Sunday services, and prayer walks. We got some time to sightsee, played Ultimate, and ate deep-fried Mars bars.
I don’t remember the moment. I wish I did. I wish I could tell you right where I was standing or sitting, what I was wearing, or what scenery was in my view. But I remember what I said to God. I said, “If this is being a missionary, I can do this. Because this place feels like home.”
And it did. Maybe it was because they spoke English — and my previous mission trips (to Costa Rica and France) were challenging for me in that area. Maybe it was the weather or the people. I don’t know.
But when I left that country, I knew I would be back.
And then I forgot Scotland.
For seven years, I lived my life and did my thing and never thought about going back. There would be glimpses, moments of longing or hoping or something, but it was never long or thought out. Instead, I would hear something Scottish or watch a movie or see a sign and think, “I love that place.”
It didn’t take much courage in 2007 when an opportunity arose to sign up to help lead a camp for Christian youth near Glasgow, Scotland. So I went. And I loved every long-sleeves-in-the-summer minute of it. It also didn’t take courage to go back to that camp in 2008. The only minute of sheer panic, when courage would have helped, was at the end of that 2008 trip, in a van, driving by Loch Ness. I had just been baptized in that lake, and we were heading to dinner. Tom Fraley, an American pastor and missionary in Edinburgh, turned around from the row of seats in front of me, looked into my eyes, and said, “Annie, do you wanna move here and work with us?”
I was literally five days away from moving to Nashville. When I got home from this trip, I would pack my final things and load my car and leave Marietta, the home I had always known, and drive to Tennessee to live there.
I said no to Tom. In that shocked and quick kind of way. Not now. Maybe someday, but not now.
But that idea never left my head. Every six months or so after that, as I settled into Nashville and built my life, the Fraleys and I would skype or email. Tom would say they were ready for me to come, but I would have just signed a lease for a new place to live or agreed to a freelance writing job that required me to be in Nashville. Or I would call to say I was ready to come over, and Tom would say I was welcome, but the timing probably wasn’t the best.
I didn’t really want to leave Nashville, but something still tugged at me. And I wasn’t as afraid this time. Because here’s what I learned from moving those three hours north of Marietta in 2008: When God tells you to be brave, he will make it work. It won’t be perfect. It won’t be easy. But it will be your story and your best story.
So Edinburgh didn’t seem like the lunatic decision it would have a few years before, when I was still that Annie who lived in her hometown.
But nonetheless, because I am, by nature, horribly wimpy, I found a good middle ground to moving across the ocean. (You know those people who decide to move somewhere and sell all their stuff and then move and figure it out when they get there? Yeah, that’s not me.) Tom and his wife, Leigh Ann, and I settled on a plan. I went to Edinburgh for a month and lived with them. I went in the dead of winter, when days are terribly short and flights are terribly cheap, to try the whole experience on for size. No mission team full of hometown friends. No short two-week stay. Just me in a foreign country for an entire month trying to figure out if I wanted to take this step.
I landed on a Tuesday.
But Friday evening on my way home from dinner at my new friend Mary’s house, I knew I was going to move to Edinburgh.
At the end of that month overseas, I came home to Nashville and took a few months to get things in order, sell or store my belongings, and eat a lot of Mexican food. I posted a map of the city of Edinburgh in my room and read over it, memorizing every street near my future flat and our church and marking where each of my friends lived. And then three days after my thirty-first birthday, three years after moving to Nashville, I cried in the Atlanta airport as I said good-bye to my parents and got on a plane that was taking me to a life I had only dreamed about and prayed for, never knowing it would actually have legs (or, I guess, wings).
But I knew it would be okay. I had seen, with the move to Nashville, that changing cities when it is God’s idea ends up being an awesome idea. It isn’t free. It isn’t always easy. But it’s a good idea.
And I was luckier this time. I already had people in Scotland I loved, thanks to previous trips and my month-long stay. Harry and Anne, a couple who live on the west coast of Scotland, are practically my family. Harry took me to my first real British soccer match (Go, Rangers!) and bought me a team scarf to proudly wear. I am indebted to him forever. Tom and Leigh Ann, the pastors of Crossroads Church, knew me and loved me well. This church they were planting was to be a place for university students to hear about Christ. They had created a church plant team of volunteers from a partner church. That team was made up of some folks who had become my best friends earlier that year — Esther and Harry, Leisa, James, Kenneth, Melissa — and I couldn’t wait to get back to them and join Tom as a member of the church staff. I had a community I loved in Edinburgh, and I was eager to return home to them.
I landed in Edinburgh in July with a return ticket to Atlanta booked for Thanksgiving, the tail end of November. Thanksgiving is the one holiday that my mother insists we all be present and accounted for. In my thirty-three years of existence, I have only missed half of a Thanksgiving Day, thanks to attending the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2009. (Don’t worry. I flew home to Atlanta that afternoon to be with my family.)
The plan was that the November flight from Scotland would just be to celebrate the holidays and then I’d move back to Edinburgh long-term in the new year.
Edinburgh benefited from those lessons I learned by uprooting my life the first time and moving to Nashville. I moved into the Morningside neighborhood and began to live there like I was going to be there for the rest of my life.
I quickly learned to maneuver my local Tesco, the grocery store on the corner near my flat. I also learned my way around Waitrose, the Whole Foods-esque fancy grocery store, because if there is one thing I will splurge on, it is ingredients. I figured out the bus routes (after a major melt-down due to memorizing the bus stops on the wrong side of the street). I bought a cell phone with map capabilities, for obvious Annie reasons. I loved my Scottish friends like I was never leaving them.
I was happy. Blissfully so.
The fall in Edinburgh is beautiful and crisp and the days get short in a blink, but those early afternoon hours take on a golden hue that I’ve never seen before. After lunch one day in early October, I sat at the Starbucks across the street from the Eric Liddell Centre with just my journal, my Bible, a peach muffin, and a soy chai.
I felt totally alive. I felt more alive that day than I had in years. It was like every internal cylinder was firing and I was the optimum Annie. I began to journal, asking God what it was that was causing my heart to live in a perpetual state of pure, happy explosion.
I listed three things that were true because I wanted to find the reason behind this and hold tight to it.
1. I lived in Edinburgh, Scotland.
If this was it, the thing that made me feel so alive, then my suspicions would be true — I was staying because it was the best place for my life and my heart and, to be honest, my body. I was getting so much daily walking exercise that I felt the healthiest I had in years. And I loved living there.
2. I was single.
While I certainly hoped this wasn’t it (because I wanted to get married and have a family), I had to call a spade a spade. It was a possibility. The fact that I was simultaneously feeling like the best version of Annie and also being single was a new emotion for me. I didn’t feel like something was lacking, and that was worth noticing.
3. College ministry was a big part of my life.
I had not spent time with college students since the year after I graduated college and worked at UGA’s Wesley Foundation. But here I was mentoring and discipling and hanging out with college students on a daily basis, and I remembered how happy it made me then and how fulfilling it was now.
I looked through the list and asked God again, “What is it, God, that makes me feel so alive?” While all three of those things were true for me that day, and the combination of them was making me into the best me, I knew my next step was going to be determined by that list and the question I was asking that day. I had to decide one way or the other: Was I booking a flight back to Edinburgh after the holidays, or was my time in this city done for now?
And quietly in my heart, I heard, “You can do college ministry anywhere.”
And I knew. I sat back in my chair, a little in awe, and said out loud to no one and everyone, “Oh. I’m going home.” I know this sounds crazy, but it hadn’t crossed my mind before — that I might not keep living there. But it was clear. I would go home to Nashville and find a way to invite myself into the lives of college students there, even though I didn’t know a single one of them. I knew my church had some sort of college ministry, so I just hoped I could get involved. I didn’t know how it would happen, but at that table as the sun set over Edinburgh before dinnertime, I knew when I flew home that Thanksgiving after working at Crossroads Church for a semester, I was going back to Nashville. And I knew I didn’t want a life without college students in it.
It was a painful departure, even knowing it was the right thing to do. It breaks my heart over and over again that some of the people I love the most are on the other side of the ocean. I tell people often that no matter where I am — Marietta, Nashville, Edinburgh — I am home and yet I’m not home. Chunks of my heart live in each city, and it won’t be until heaven when everyone I love will be within reach.
Because when I left those friends in Scotland the day before Thanksgiving 2011, I knew I was leaving for good.
Today I don’t live in Edinburgh. I live in Nashville.
Eleven years.
Eleven years and two months after that first trip to Edinburgh, the trip where my heart found a home and my knower connected with a land it seemed to have always known, my map pointed me there again and it became my literal home. An address on Mardale Crescent and everything.
I saw God in Edinburgh like I never had before. In struggles that threatened to shred parts of my heart, in friendships that felt lifelong (and are going to be), in visions from God for our ministry and for the city and the university students there. I learned how to lead from some of the finest. I made mistakes like I was paid to do it. I was more fiercely independent than I ever knew possible.
It broke me to move to Nashville in 2008, when I left Marietta and everything that was safe and hometown. It broke me into one hundred pieces and I saw them lying on the floor of that first house in which I lived on 11th Avenue South. I thought they’d never connect again. But they did, in better ways, in a mosaic that made me more me. But Edinburgh? It bent me. I didn’t shatter. Nashville changed me in ways that made Edinburgh possible and more beautiful.
I went to Scott and Faith’s house outside of Edinburgh city centre for tea one afternoon in September. Faith asked me about my story — what had me here and where it all started. I told her of that first trip to Edinburgh when I was a sophomore at Georgia, of Helene who led us and taught us so well, of how I felt at home. I had looked for that ministry, googling everything I could to no avail, and I said that to her. Faith’s face lit up. “I actually know that ministry, and I know of Helene.” I could have cried right there. Faith told me of Wester Hailes (I had forgotten the name of the high-rise building neighborhood) and told me how to make contact.
So I mapped it, only to see that my flat was less than four miles from that very place, the place where my first “world missionary” heart was born. And thanks to Faith’s resources, I emailed Helene. I thanked her, mainly, and asked her to lunch. I wanted her to know I was there, in many ways, because of her. It was those first weeks in 2000, the ones that opened my nineteen-year-old heart to a people and a place that would both eventually be my home.