Month: July 2016

An Open Door 99 Floors Up

An Open Door 99 Floors Up

It was a first date. We’d never met, but I recognized him from his picture as he waited for me across the street from the L station. It was early December, before sunset, and we were meeting downtown to look at Christmas lights after he finished his shift.

The streets were crowded with shoppers, the Christmas decorations sparkled and twinkled, and we were hitting it off. I liked his deep, resonant voice and we talked in an easy rhythm. He was tall, black Irish with broad shoulders, and there was a spark in his eye I liked.

When he offered to show me the skyscraper where he worked as a building engineer, I was game.

I love these buildings that hold up the sky — I always have. When I walk the city canyons at their feet, they make me breathe deep and feel tall (all 5’2″ of me). I’ll probably never get over walking around like a tourist downtown with my head turned to the sky.

We got in one elevator to take us up to the building management office, and after he picked up some keys, another took us higher.

The 99th floor was filled with machinery bigger than my apartment — all the guts of the building, rumbling away. As we walked around the huge space, he guided me to an ordinary door, turned the key in its lock, and opened a door to the glory of the city at dusk.

The sky was pink and dark purple, and the city glittered with lights. As I leaned out into the view, I could feel a surprisingly warm breeze embrace me. There was nothing between me and the city and sky but the wind.

It was a door to nowhere that opened into maybe the biggest view I’d ever seen. In the end, there were four of them, one on each outer wall of the building, each of them with a completely different but equally spectacular view.

I didn’t have to go up those elevators with him on our first date, and I surely didn’t have to lean out each of those doors. There was obvious risk. But I did go up, and I did lean out, and I saw things I’d never seen before, and I saw familiar things from an entirely new perspective. I felt a wind that I’ll never feel again – the warm wind that embraces the highest floors of that building.

I’ll never forget what it felt like to stand in an open door 99 floors up with nothing between me and the world but the wind.

I’ll never forget what it felt like to lean out into the risk and the beauty. To breathe it all in and feel my world expand to fill it. To hold the impossible fullness of it all.

We talked for over eight hours of walking and eating and more walking that night, but I’m not sure I ever really stopped leaning out into that wind.

Wading into the Wild Goose

Wading into the Wild Goose

Tomorrow I’ll head out for the hills of western North Carolina and the Wild Goose Festival (named for the Celtic symbol of the Holy Spirit).

Five years ago, when I went to the Goose for the first time, I had no real idea what I was getting into. I realized pretty quickly that I was one of the most conservative people there.

That’s not true this year — hasn’t been true for the past few years.

Wild Goose did not begin the journey for me — that happened something like 15 years ago in North Carolina when I picked up a new non-fiction at the library called A New Kind of Christian.

Or 20 years ago when I first became friends with some Presbyterians and learned that there’s not just one “right” way to read Scripture.

Or nearly 30 years ago when fundamentalist missionaries I was visiting in France explained how culture contextualized their understanding of the morality of wine.

Or 35 years ago when I stumbled onto Madeleine L’Engle’s A Circle of Quiet and first encountered a woman who loved Jesus and looked nothing like Christians I knew.

Or when I first learned to read and enter others’ stories and lives and see a world of endless perspectives.

I’m not sure our journeys ever “begin,” but there are moments that shift something, that change something. That take all the things that came before and reorder them into new realizations and new ways of seeing.

Wild Goose gave me a space, for four days each summer, to dive into that. To live beside and walk with and listen to and share beauty and grief and pain and joy with people who lived very different lives and fought very different battles than I had.

And, it turned out, some from remarkably similar places.

Wild Goose is a spiritual refugee camp for a motley collection of people who, for a host of reasons, find themselves outside the lines traditional Christianity has drawn.

Having that space each summer opened me up. It gave me the space to ask questions, of myself as much as others. And it prepared me to dive into a different kind of community at home and be changed by it.

Wild Goose showed me Jesus obliterating the lines, loving and walking with people in all sorts of journeys, just wading in.

And I waded in after him. I’m looking forward to wading in deeper this year!

(That’s the back of my head in the picture!)

Risking the Bet

Risking the Bet

I made a big change today. It’s become a bit of a thing for me in the past couple of years — making changes.

If I want my life to be different, but I’m not willing to change anything, nothing’s very like to change.

But the thing is, change means risk. The bigger the change the bigger the risk.

Today, I left my job of seven years and a lot of people I love.

When you let something go in order to pick up something different, that something different may end up being a bust. It could blow up in your face. And even if it’s good change, there’s loss to grieve.

Opening yourself up to something new is a risky bet. Whether it’s a new job, a new home, a new relationship, or new territory in a friendship , there’s a lot to lose.

And we develop defenses around these things. My emotional brain spends a good amount of time telling me things like, “We’re doing WHAT?!?!? What the heck are you thinking??? Don’t you know what could happen here?”

That’s really the kicker — what could happen. The way life has gone before and the way that has taught me, consciously and not, that it will always or at least usually go.

My emotional self doesn’t trust me. Sometimes so much that it tries to take the wheel, even fights me for it.

But my rational and spiritual self has learned (is still learning) that every day really is new. That I can make different choices and impact the way things go. That would could happen isn’t what has to happen.

And so much is on the line. Joy is on the line. And life. Beauty and growth and possibility. Love is on the line.

We will never be more open to love and joy and life than we are open to pain and loss. You can’t guard against loss without also guarding against all the good things.

New life is there for us, but we always have to open our hands and let go of something we know to receive it.

In two weeks I start a new job. I don’t know where it might take me, how it might challenge and change me. But I’m excited for the possibilities, for the room to grow further into who I’m made to be. For good things I haven’t imagined.

The more I let go to reach out for something new, the more my emotional self learns there are more possibilities. She’s learning to relax, at least a little. To trust me and trust the good things. She’s learning that on the other side of loss, there’s always the possibility of new life. That while the unknown is still scary, it’s also full of beautiful surprises.

She’s learning to risk the bet.