Moving Day

The professional packers and movers have arrived and set to work. Our home and lives, already boxed and stacked in a garage, are being carefully and efficiently unpacked, inventoried, repacked, and stored for a journey across land and sea.

Something about moving makes stages of life stark, divisions bold, it raises seams in the patchwork. It also forces the question.

With every box moved - every crafted piece of ourselves possessed by and entrusted to another - I am asked over and over again: am I really doing this? Am I ready? What is happening to me?

I would be such a bad Buddhist, with such attachment to things. It is funny how much we identify our own personhood and identity with objects. (Of course, this might make me a poor Christian, too, if one takes Luke 18:18-30 seriously.)

I may be making too existentialist a point of this. It may just be the rising anxiety of change, of shift, of newness and unknowing. That strange brew of fear and eagerness, foreboding and adventure, wanting to hold back and the ardent desire to just get going already.

And to add to all the other complexities, Seattle woke up this morning under a blanket of snow. Anyone familiar with the peoples of the Puget Sound will remember that a half-centimeter of crystaline precipitation is enough to shut the region down. There is no infrastructure to clear or handle snow, and there is apparently no widespread sense of how to drive in even the smallest amount of it. And I'm located on the top of a kind of hill.

So our departure is covered with a film of newness, cleanliness, and is made a bit slippery. We have to watch our footing around here - and, I suppose, accept the possibility of falling a few times on our way. Such is life. Not just the life of a minister or a disciple; just life in general. After all, ministers are people, too; and disciples. Life is uncertain and slippery for all of us.

And, I think, we're all probably moving, too, one way or another.