Walking Home in the Fog

As a kid—now as a romantic, I thought of fog as the heavenly clouds dipping down to embrace the earth.  I also used to think of thunder as God doing some heavenly bowling, but that is another story for another time--probably when I explain to my grandchildren the more intricate details of nature.  Though some would describe fog as being a cloud at ground level, it is not.  Fog is created by supersaturation of the air, so that the air can no longer hold the water vapor.  The water vapor precipitates out into small droplets of condensation, or fog.  The world and things look different in the fog.  Fog has a tendency to muffle and distort sound . . . tends to make it difficult to see . . . thus making navigation and travel difficult.

I think that it is easy to get lost in the fog . . . especially as we are making our way back home.

This past week I finally got around to fulfilling a gift that had been given to me by my sister . . . I finally got around to creating that photobook that she had given me the funding to do.  It was a simple project . . . go through all the photographs I had taken since I had moved to Montana and create a book of the best of them.  She gave it to me for my birthday . . . nearly eight months ago.  I think the truancy of starting and completing the book was the fact that I had gotten lost in the fog.  No matter how many times I sat down to start the project . . . well, I just couldn’t find my bearings.  I was lost.

Going through nearly eight years of photographs is more difficult than it sounds . . . I take a lot of photos . . . as I tell anyone interested in photography, you have to take a lot of pictures to get one good one.  In all those years I had taken a lot of pictures.  Yet, it was not the immensity of the number of photos I had to view, it was finding the desire to do it . . . finding the gumption to do it. Finally, I sat down and created the book.  What a revelation that exercise in creativity turned out to be . . . an epiphany of sorts.

Whether anyone else likes my pictures or not, I like them.  I have no difficulty sitting and going through thousands of pictures . . . reliving each and every story associated with them.  That is always a joy as even the really lousy pictures have a story to tell.  No, it was not having to go through thousands of pictures.  I did it.  The wife says that it is a beautiful photobook.  She might be a little bias . . . but, that is what makes her a good wife.  I guess we will see once we get the final copy.  The final copy is not the epiphany . . . it and all the work that led up to it revealed just how deeply mired I had been in the fog that settled upon my life over the past few years.

As I went through each year’s pictures . . . pictures of hiking trips in the mountains, jaunts down to Yellowstone, critter creeping excursions, snowshoeing in the Beartooths, or even moosing around the West Fork Road . . . each year revealed fewer and fewer of those moments—those adventures, taking place in my life.  As I progressed through each year, there were fewer and fewer adventures . . . fewer explorations, until this past year when I noticed that in a twelve month period I had hardly done anything except photograph the hell out of the birds that visited the Keener Homestead.  It was an epiphany . . . gone were the adventures that brought excitement and joy and growth to my life . . . instead I found the revelation that I had been wandering in the fog, trying to find my way back home.  I had lost that foundation that brought happiness and joy to my life . . . and, it wasn’t only the photographs that were telling this story, it was also the scantiness of my writing.  My blog was dying.

Wandering around in the fog probably best describes it.  I am sure some of you really sharp individuals out there will get all psychological and pronounce the fog as being depression . . . but, save it.  It was not depression . . . it was fog.  It has been a period of time in my life when things have been muffled, distorted, and difficult to see and hear.  The spiritual mystics might call it the “dark night of the soul”, but I still like wandering around in the fog.  In darkness a person just cannot see, in fog it is not that a person cannot see . . . it is distorted . . . just a blurry image . . . not quite gone, but not quite there.  Always teasing and prodding.  Depression is a deep, dark hole that is hopeless and foreboding.  Fog is wandering around seeking some sort of anchor to hold onto.  I have not been depressed . . . just sort of wandering around, attempting to get my bearings, and hoping like crazy that I do not bump into anything that would hurt me.  I have just been wanting to get home.

Isn’t that what we all want?  To get back home?  The problem is that we sometimes stumble into the fog . . . or the fog slowly creeps up on us . . . until that moment when we suddenly realize that we are not sure where we are at, how we got there, or where we are going.  We are engulfed in this hazy middle ground between here and there . . . as if nothing else exists and we are left wandering . . . searching. 

In my life, the fog is lifting.  It is not the head that guides one through the fog towards home . . . it is the heart.  I think the head helps create the fog, while the heart finds its way home.  Since completing that photobook project the heart has been leading me out of the fog . . . it has revealed the light breaking forth . . . beyond the fog there is clarity.  Though the fog has kept me safe, insulated me from the world around me . . . the time has come to get back on track . . . to dream . . . to risk . . . to get back in the mountains and hike . . . to live adventures . . . to see where God is calling me to go . . . to get back home. 

Yeah, we all want to get home . . . sometimes the journey home is through the fog.  An important prayer in the congregation I serve is the prayer of “traveling mercies” . . . it is a prayer of keeping those on a journey safe in their coming and going . . . a prayer of revelation that despite the journey—good or bad, that the sojourner is never alone . . . God is with them as much as they are in the thoughts and prayers of those who offer the prayer.  It is prayer of the heart . . . and, it is the heart that carries us safely through the fog of life.  I guess, in a way, fog really is clouds embracing the earth in an intimate embrace . . . in the Old Testament wasn’t God often portrayed as a cloud leading the people?  Maybe fog is just God putting us in a bear hug until we can continue on in our journeys to home.  I find comfort in that.

As Big as a House

“Some day you’ll own a home

That’s as big as a house”

(It’s a Big Old Goofy World by John Prine)

I am 56 years old.  I was born in Wareham, Massachusetts.  By the time I graduated from high school I had gone to at least ten different schools.  I have lived in thirteen different states since I was born . . . which means I have spent an average of a little over four years in any one of the states I have lived in.  I guess that is to be expected of one who grew up as a military brat and a minister . . . both have a tendency to move around a lot.  If a person asks me where my “roots” are, I usually answer them that my “roots” are wherever I happen to be at the moment.  I have spent a lifetime being a nomad.

My wife, on the other hand, grew up in the same house and town until she graduated high school.  She attended one school.  She never moved until she went off to college . . . seventeen miles down the road.  She had never lived farther than twenty miles from where she grew up until we moved to southern Indiana to serve our first parish . . . it was ninety miles from her home . . . and, there was heartbreak on her part.  It just about killed her when we moved to central Nebraska two years later . . . you would have thought I took her to the ends of the earth.  She grew up with roots . . . with a place that she called home.  Whenever she is asked where her “roots” are . . . where “home” is . . . she always answers, “Paris, Kentucky.”

I have always been envious of those who have “roots” . . . who have a place to call “home”.  I have never had that experience.  Wherever I have lived I have always been that stranger passing through.  Military families have a tendency to move a lot . . . so do the families of pastors.  True, they make a lot of friends and acquaintances . . . but rarely are they remembered as being a part of the “real community”.  They have no “roots” . . . eventually they just become footnotes to those who remember them.  That has been my life story . . . just a stranger passing through.

I think as an adult I have spent a lot of my life trying to get back “home” . . . trying to get back to those old familiar haunts that bring comfort, safety, and that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you reconnect with what you once remembered.  The problem is . . . well, the problem is that none of those places exist for me anymore.  Too much time has passed by in those places where I really didn’t spend a whole lot of time to begin with . . . no one remembers me . . . they were just weigh stations in the journey of life.  It is not like that for my wife.  She goes “home” and people remember her, tell stories, laugh, and catch up . . . there is still family there . . . old friends and classmates.  She walks by buildings and she remembers.  When you are a stranger passing through all the buildings begin to look the same . . . and, you long.  You long for that familiar place . . . a place to call “home”.

Montana was the one place I longed to live since I was a little kid.  Its beauty and splendor is captivating and awesome.  The population is just right for an introvert . . . about six people or less for every square mile.  It was the place I dreamed of . . . a place where I could finally put down my “roots” and call it “home”.  But, that was a fallacy.  Despite buying a house and living in it for over six years now . . . by the way, it is the first house the wife and I have ever owned . . . this is not the place of “roots” . . . not the where my children will come back to and feel the comfortableness of “home”.  They will not find it because this is not their “roots” . . . not their “home”.  The homestead will not be a place that will be passed on from generation to generation . . . it will be a place where the wife and I lived for a time.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Montana is the place I have chosen to spend my dying days.  I cannot promise that it will be in this exact house because I would move in a heartbeat if I ever find a nice piece of property outside of the town limits.  Neither the wife nor I want to move anywhere else . . . though there are times that the wife hints at it . . . we have made a commitment to this beautiful place.  In a sense, this is where we have chosen to make a “home” for ourselves.  The problem is that the location is never going to be “home” in the same sense it is for a lot of other people.

Despite this deep desire to get back “home” again . . . to establish “roots” in a place . . . I think that I have known for a long, long time that “home” is not in a place, but that it is in the heart.  Home is where the heart is . . . as trite as that might sound, it is true.

The comfortableness does not come from the physical surroundings, but from the people that fill that space.  After I left home to begin college my parents moved at least three times before I graduated . . . in none of those places did I have a room that was considered mine . . . but, I always felt as if I was going “home”.  I was going “home” because of the people who inhabited that space . . . my parents, my siblings . . . the people that I loved.  So it has been with all the moves that the wife and I have made over the years . . . the space has been different, but the people have always been the same . . . it is filled with the people we love.  It is the same experience that our children talk about now as adults and when they come “home”.  It is the familiar faces . . . the teasing and joking around . . . the laughter and the tears . . . it is the embrace that is warm and familiar no matter where it is given . . . it is a “fit” that never goes away. 

“Some day you will own a home that is as big as a house.”  That is the reality of what I am really shooting for now in my life . . . that I own a “home” that is as big as a house.  That “home” is not a place, but in my heart.  It is in my heart because that is where I keep those people that make me comfortable . . . that love me . . . that trust me . . . that accept me for who I am.  Despite my wisecracking ways, when I say that “home” is where I am, there is a truth to that statement. 

The wife and I do not plan on moving any time soon . . . if ever.  Home is wherever we are whether we have the traditional “roots” or not.  Home is that knowing glance in the eyes of those that I love . . . that acknowledge me . . . that love me . . .

If I keep working at it that “home” I will own won’t be the size of a house . . . it will be a mansion.  Home is found in the love that is shared . . . and, we all know, love has no limits.  Gee, but it is great to be “home”.

On the Road Home

“I knew then that I wanted to go home, but I had no home to go to--and that is what adventures are all about.”

(Trina Schart Hyman)

After all of these years, you would think that I would be used to it by now.  Used to the question of “where you from?”  But, I am not.  That has always been an uncomfortable question for me because it means I have to jump into storytelling mode . . . I have to go into the long explanation that I am a military brat who moved around a lot the first 21 years of his life . . . I have to explain that I am a member of that club known as ministers who have a tendency to move around a lot . . . explain that I can tell people where my parents were from, but outside of where I was born, I can’t really say where I am from . . . but, odds are, name a place and I have probably been there!  Most people close their ears after the phrase “military brat” because that says it all . . . I am from nowhere in particular.  I have no particular place that I can point to, call it “home”, and feel confident that people know and understand what I am talking about.

When my father went into the military, he and my mother joined the band of nomadic people sent all over the world to serve their country.  We kids—my two brothers and sister—got to go along for the ride from the day we born. I was born in Wareham, Massachusetts, as was my first brother; my sister was born at Walter Reed in Washington, D.C.; and, little brother was born in Phoenix, Arizona . . . none of which any of us call “home”.  Our father was raised in Alabama; our mother in North Carolina . . . we kids were raised in Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., Arizona, Georgia, Colorado, Nebraska, Maryland, Guam, California, Kansas, and, Panama all by the time I was 21 years old—none of which I consider to be “home”.  Since then I have lived in Kentucky, Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, Nebraska again, and, now Montana.  See how difficult it is to answer the question of where I am from . . . I am from nowhere, but everywhere. 

It has been said that “home” is where your heart is, and I have embraced that saying throughout my lifetime . . . and, it has been said that “home” is where your family is, and I have accepted that also.  I can honestly say that I have always adapted to wherever it was that I was laying my head down at the end of the day . . . that I was “home”.  What I cannot do, is to point to a particular place and declare it “home”—the place where I come from.  The wife was born and raised in Paris, Kentucky.  She proudly proclaims that she is a native of Paris, Kentucky . . . a native of Kentucky.  When asked where she comes from she is quick to respond, “Paris, Kentucky!”  When she has the opportunity to return to her hometown, people still know her and her family, people still swap stories . . . she is “home”.  I have never had that experience and it has been one that I have spent a lifetime trying to reconcile.

As much as I buy into the idea that “home” is where the heart is . . . “home” is where the family is . . . I still want a place to call “home”.  Yeah, “home” might be those two things, but it is also a place.  Don’t let anyone fool you, “home” also is a place . . . and, places play significant roles in all of our lives.

In the Old Testament, God’s people were a homeless people who desired a place of their own to call “home”.  It wasn’t good enough to call being in the presence of God, “home”; they wanted a physical place that they could call “home”.  Place has a significant role in the story of faith, then and now.  Living in Montana among those American Indians who once inhabited this area and have been removed; they, too, long to return to their homeland . . . return to the place where they are “home”.  Place plays a significant role in their understanding of who they are.  I admire those who have a place to call “home” . . . a place where they can point to a landmark and tell a story of their family . . . a place that means something to them personally and spiritually.  I long for such a place . . . such meaning in my life . . . a place I can leave for my children and they can tell the stories.

Ever since I was a child, there had been a longing to move to Montana.  Not quite sure what the reason was, but the need to get to Montana was always there.  I always told people I wanted to move there because there were no people . . . and, though that is partly true, I am sure that was not the main reason.  Almost five years ago, we moved to Montana.  It was a move that both the wife and I felt God was calling us to make even after much prayer and discernment.  We have loved living in Montana.  It has slowly become home for us.

Neither one of us wants to ever move from Montana . . . though the wife lets me know from time to time that she would like to live in a bigger town.  We have found “home” . . . at least I think we have.  We love the beauty of the place where we live . . . we enjoy and love our little house . . . our hearts are here, and so is our family—a family that has grown since moving here with a son-in-law and granddaughter, a soon to be daughter-in-law.  Our roots are digging in.  We have found purpose and meaning where we are.  I feel it whenever I sit around the fire pit with the family gathered . . . I feel it in the stories and laughter . . . I feel it in the presence of the place . . . I am home.  It feels good to have a home.

Yes, I still dread answering the question of “where are you from?”  But, I am getting better at it . . . now, when asked the question, I tell folks that I am from Joliet. Montana.  If that is not good enough for them, well, then, I tell them my story.  It is a story of adventure to find a home.  Sounds kind of biblical to me . . . home.  It sounds good to me . . . home.

  

And, the Rest of the Story?

Nowhere in the New Testament does it tell us the “rest of the story” as Paul Harvey used to say it.  We never learn how the story ends.  The prodigal son returns . . . the father throws him a humdinger of a party to welcome him home . . . the older son throws a hissy fit . . . and that is it!  The story is done.  Inquiring minds want to know, what happened next?

Did the youngest son stick to the straight and narrow?  Did the oldest son carry his grudge to the Hatfield and McCoy’s level?  Did the father still love them both even if the reprieve was brief and everyone returned to their old behaviors?  Did the neighbors still point their fingers and whisper?  How did things end up?

Next week I drive down to Colorado to pick the oldest son and bring him to Montana where he will be starting a new job at the start of November.  The oldest son has been the prodigal our lives since he graduated high school and moved away.  He would tell you that his experiences over the past six to seven years were fairly reflective of the youngest son in the story of the prodigal son.  He would readily admit that he did more than his fair share of sowing wild oats and paying the consequences of those actions.  He would also tell you that he has learned a lot of tough lessons.  He has caused his mother and father more than a little heartbreak through it all, but we have always left the door open for him to come home—figuratively and literally.  Now, the time has come and he is returning home.

I think that this has been one of those decisions for him that pulled him in a lot of different directions.  On the one hand, he wants to come home and be with his family; on the other hand, there are still a lot of loose ends that won’t be tied up when he slams that door behind him.  At this point in his life he believes that this is the best thing that he can do as he continues on this new journey he began about six months ago.  At home he will have the love and support of his family.

But it won’t be easy.

It won’t be easy because there is always the past that hangs around like a shadow that can’t be shook . . . always waiting to rear its ugly head and bite him in the rear.  It won’t be easy because it will be a whole new experience that at times will be frustrating.  In times of frustration there is safety in going back to that which is familiar and comfortable . . . going back to the past.  There are issues of trust no matter how many reassuring words are spoken by those who love him . . . as it is for him, so it is for the family who loves him.  It is easy to revert back to the past when things get messed up.  The journey is just beginning and there are many paths—forward and backward—that he could choose to travel down.  And, yet, the prodigal returns and no one is quite sure how the story is going to end . . . we have never been told.

Like most people I want to believe that the story of the prodigal ended with a “happily ever after”, but I am also a realist.  Life is never as smooth as it is in stories or movies; there are bumps along the way.  Because of that I have a sense of wariness of what the future will bring for the story.  I think that all parents do when it comes to their children no matter what their situations . . . we worry about their futures . . . worry about their happiness . . . their success.  We only want the best for them.  So, we worry and wonder how the story will end.

As our oldest child returns to the fold, I can only deal with the present part of the story.  The prodigal has come a long ways in the past six months.  He has done much to straighten out his life and determine what his priorities are.  He has done well and, both his mother and I are quite proud of him.  The story is slowly leaning towards that “happily ever after” ending, but we have a long ways to go.  For now, we are glad to have him coming home . . . and that is enough for now.

Maybe there was a reason for the writer of the story not to tell us the rest of the story . . . maybe the point of the story--to step into the shoes of those involved and to stand before that great mystery of “what next?”  To discover that real faith begins at that point. 

We welcome the prodigal home.  We embrace him and shower him with our love.  Now what?  Faith . . . I have faith in him, I have faith in God.  My prayer is simple for all of us as we stand at the nexus of the story: “Thy will be done.”  We have to start somewhere and together we start here.