Our journeys are much clearer in hindsight, aren’t they? When we are out of them and can take a step back and see the full picture, the full map.
I like to think of the uncharted journey as a trail of stones. The stone you stand on right now, today, has a stone in front of it and behind. The stone in front is blurry and covered by thick brush. The stone behind is smooth and shiny, and the step to it is clear. Over and over again as we grow, we have this choice to step onto the stone in front or step back onto the one behind. The way forward is into the unknown. The way back is home, where you came from. And the way back is an entirely feasible option. You can always, always go back. No one will stop you. It is not sinful. It is not wrong to go back. While you journey ahead, in the corner of your eye is the arrow that points home. It’s there to comfort you, to remind you where you are from. It’s good to have that constant arrow pointing behind you. But just because it’s there is no reason to turn around and head that direction. Because you can, doesn’t mean you should. But so often we do. So often we take the road back, the road more traveled. I wonder if Robert Frost ever found himself not on a “diverging” road in the wood, but rather, on a straight road, where he looked forward and then back, wondering which direction to go.
We return to what is known for all the sensible reasons we tell ourselves, when really we are only returning because we know what’s there. And going someplace you know is so much more comfortable and sensible than going someplace you don’t. And I’ll say it again, it is not wrong to go back. But let me ask you this, how much faith and trust is required of you when you go home versus when you step into something unknown? Whose knowledge and strength must you depend upon?
You might be standing on a stone that you know, quietly in the back of your soul, requires you to go forward, with a machete, into the brush and fogginess and darkness. If so, the rest of this story is for you. If not, don’t worry, you’ll find yourself on that stone one day soon, so this is for you too.
Dallas made sense. I had put in my Oxford time. My course ended in September. What would leaving a few months early matter? I could get a teaching job. I could live with my college friend, who lived down the street from our other college friends.
I kept repeating the sense of it to myself: It makes sense to move to Dallas. I should do this. I should go back to Texas. I know Texas. I love Texas. It is so hot in Texas. I would see the sun again. I would remember what it feels like to sweat, to get inside a hot car and feel the leather of the seats nearly burn the skin off the backs of my legs. I wanted that. I wanted hot car-seat leather to burn the backs of my legs.
And so I began crafting My Big Oxford Escape Plan.
I wrote e-mails to people back home. My dad arranged something with a local university’s library so I could finish my thesis from Texas. I told Ashley I was definitely interested in the apartment, that I just needed to get some things in order before I gave her the final yes. What things? I didn’t know, but some ends felt loose and in need of tying.
I told Oxford I was ready to let go of it even if it wasn’t ready to let go of me.
I picked a date to leave. June 7. It sounded like a nice departure date. It sounded summery. I told Alice and Lizzy so they could start searching for someone to take my room when I left. I marked it on my mental calendar. I began a mental countdown, tearing off the calendar days happily and with gusto. After a few days though, I didn’t tear those pages off so excitedly. I started feeling myself put the brakes on my moving train, but I wasn’t sure why.
I went over My Big Oxford Escape Plan in my head. “June 7,” I chanted to myself. “I am leaving June 7! I will leave June 7!” The chant, no matter how loudly I chanted it, felt like a lie. I tried harder. I reminded myself that this was what I wanted and this was what I had decided on. Still, unease was rising up inside me. I could feel it. I pushed it back down, trying to remember home and the heat, my college friends, the apartment, the pieces that seemed to fit, but it didn’t work. No matter how sensible the sense was that I was trying to make to myself, my insides squirmed around and around and around. Rest did not accompany my sense.
I wasn’t able to talk myself into my own plan, and if I couldn’t follow my own plan, a different plan must be in the works. For several days I actively did not pray about this. I didn’t want to. If God had something else in mind, I didn’t want to hear it. Things usually work out well when we actively don’t pray about stuff.
One night at church during a worship service, I couldn’t take it anymore. Spring was coming, I still had not given a firm answer to Ashley, I still felt restless, and I needed answers. So, forgetting about the whole Lent debacle, I decided to not only start praying about June 7 but to fast about it. Fasting about a date, you ask? I know. I wasn’t sure about it either, and it felt a little extreme, but I also felt a little desperate. It was one of those decisions that you decide is the biggest decision of your life and you obsess over it until it is decided.
For the next week, I executed what I call a “dinner fast.” Instead of eating dinner, I took a walk somewhere in the city and prayed. It was probably the most prayerfully focused I’ve ever been about a decision in my life. And it was all about whether to move home in June or stay in Oxford through the summer and possibly longer. It was a season’s difference. It was nothing. Yet there I was walking the pastures of Oxford with my dinner (a café mocha) in my hand, asking God about June 7.
Each night of the fast when I got home, I made a big bowl of my favorite British cereal, Crunchy Nut, which I claimed was my “before-bed snack,” and went to bed still unclear about my choice.
I recall no grand spiritual revelations during my dinnertime walks, but I do remember one evening walking a trail I hadn’t walked before. The sun was still out, and I was beginning to believe there was a possibility that spring did indeed exist in Oxford. Looking to my left I noticed someone had gone before me and taken a detour into the tall grass. I could tell by how the grass was all smooshed in one direction, headed away from the regular footpath. I decided to follow it. I didn’t know where this stranger had gone, but I wanted to go there too. The grass and weeds stood tall on either side of me as I followed the flattened grass. After a while, I lost the stranger’s trail and had to make my own. The weeds grew even taller now. I thought I must look strange, a girl wandering through the brush away from the trail. I took a few more steps, and then suddenly, without warning, I was right beside the Thames. The grass had been blocking my view, and I didn’t realize that the entire time the weeds had been leading me here, to the water’s edge.
I stood there for a minute, surprised and delighted to see my good friend, the river. I wondered if God was going to give me an answer about June 7 right here on the riverbank. I wondered if he already had. And then I gave myself permission to stop thinking, to stop praying, and just watch the brown water flow for a minute before returning home.
Later that night, after my bowl of Crunchy Nut, I sat on my bed in my tiny room and determined I was moving back to Texas. I had not heard specifically otherwise, and so that was my decision. I opened my laptop and began e-mailing Ashley to tell her I would be moving into her apartment in June and finishing my thesis from Dallas. I tried to type some sentences, but every combination of words looked and sounded wrong. I started typing again, then quickly deleted. I tried again. Deleted again. Why can’t I word this right? Why does this feel so wrong? I kept at it though, typing with uneasy fingers, and finally, after more time than is usually required for crafting a simple e-mail, I finished it. Exhausted, I signed my name at the bottom and hovered my cursor over the Send button.
This is when things got weird. My index finger, the one I use to click my mouse, felt paralyzed. I couldn’t click Send. Click! I kept telling myself. Just click it and send! Click! But I couldn’t. My finger remained in a hovering position over my mouse and did not move.
What is happening to me? Why can’t I do this? Maybe I just need some rest. That’s it. I just need to go
to bed and send this in the morning. The fasting, the praying, the walking, it’s all made me so tired. I’ll do this tomorrow. I’ll hit Send in the morning.
So I shut my laptop, put it on the floor, rolled over, and tried to sleep.
All night, I thought about Dallas. I dreamed about it. And in my thoughts and in my dreams, Dallas was dark. Dark, and almost spooky. Dallas in real life is fine. It’s just, you know, Dallas. But Dallas in my dreams that night was bad. It was not a place I wanted to live. It was not a place I wanted to be, and at some point in the night, although I did not hear a clear and audible voice from God, I began to feel strongly that my time in Oxford was not over. That the unease I felt with My Big Oxford Escape Plan was because I was trying to force-close a chapter that was not finished being written. I had been feeling uncomfortable in Oxford, and I wanted to feel comfortable and be somewhere familiar again. But deep down I knew that was not a good reason to leave. There were more words to this chapter. I could cut it short if I wanted to, but then I would never know how it ended. I would never know what lay behind the fog and the brush. Sometimes when a chapter isn’t finished, it’s best not to force its ending.
Of all the feelings, love is the best one. But the second best is that feeling when you know you’ve taken a step in a scary but right direction. When the path before you is basically covered in trees and the footpath is overgrown and you will need a machete and a lot of courage to uncover it, but you know the path that you cannot see is the best possible path for you to be on. You have this quiet feeling deep down that the path is leading you to the water’s edge. It’s in these moments—when you choose the half-hidden path in front of you rather than the clear one behind you—that joy and peace hold hands inside your heart. That mix, that joy-peace mix, is rare. When I feel it is when I feel God the most and the deepest. It is my own apologetics. I sit and hug my knees and know he is real because the certainty mixed with the absolute uncertainty and the joy and the peace this produces and their ability to coexist is so otherworldly. There is no way it could have been caused by anything on this earth. There is no way I could have mustered up this peace and joy on my own.
The more I think about this feeling, the more I am able to see that joy and peace are actually products of trust. And not the kind of surface-level, verbal declaration of trust that we Christians are expected to make, but actual trust in a God who we believe is in control and who we believe is good. Trust that we can’t shake. Trust that, by his grace I am sure, has slinked its way into our depths so that our entire selves are so confident in who he is and what he is doing that, whether or not we can see his plan clearly, we can feel peace as we take the necessary steps forward. And we can feel joy because we serve a God who is good and loves us and is taking us this way for a reason.
It was such a small thing. Such a tiny decision to decide to stay in Oxford for a few more months. I don’t know that it determined my destiny. I think I could have moved to Dallas and been fine. I really do. I don’t believe we as humans can thwart God’s will with a decision like that. I don’t know that it was worth agonizing over, but when I look back at Oxford in the summer, I see it, and I see what I would have missed. I see that trusting God with our unknowns is not always about a dramatic end product. Instead it’s much more often about the deepening of a relationship. With each step we take forward into uncharted territory, we face our own weaknesses and, therefore, make space for God’s immeasurable strength and care and love. We see, in a way that other circumstances don’t allow, that our God, unlike all the other gods, is a God who is truly with us. He is a God who came near and stayed near and will always be near, whether it’s time to return home or it’s time to move forward.
I never sent that e-mail to Ashley. I didn’t open my computer the next morning after the index-finger paralysis. Instead, I stayed put. I let go of Dallas and decided to embrace Oxford, whatever that looked like, whatever would happen.
It’s funny. The very object that had convinced me I didn’t belong in England and needed to move back home was the same object that forced what is to date one of my proudest Oxford achievements: the microwave, or lack thereof. In the end, I conquered life without a microwave. It did not conquer me.
I stood in our small kitchen one day, and I thought about all the people who had survived without microwaves before me. Most people, I thought, most people on this earth and for all of time have been able to make food sans microwave. So could I. And I did, moving from meal to meal. I made oatmeal and popcorn on the stovetop. I baked potatoes. I reheated my coffee in a saucepan. It tasted weird and slightly burned, but I adjusted. I adjusted to almost everything in that house. Doing laundry in the kitchen, hanging it on the line outside, watching for rain so I knew when to snatch the laundry back up and move it indoors. Maneuvering a vacuum cleaner they called a hoover that looked and acted nothing like a vacuum cleaner.
I collected apples from our apple trees in the backyard. I learned to make things like crumble for dessert (equal parts sugar, butter, and flour) and tomato sauce from scratch. I became hooked on the English version of The View, scandalously titled Loose Women, that came on at noon every day, and I went to bed with a heating pad at night to help keep me warm. I mastered the French press after watching an instructional YouTube video several times in a row. I hosted people in that little cottage on Donnington Bridge and cooked for them and have never felt so proud. By the end, no microwave seemed like no big deal at all. Home was home and the absence of modern appliances and central heating didn’t destroy me or run me out of the country. I even grew to love my closet bedroom with its tiny window and my wardrobe that was awkwardly located in the hallway and was always overflowing with too many coats, too many pairs of boots. I got to know the block, a few neighbors, my local grocery store, the path to the river.
It is satisfying to sit back and realize that what once felt so foreign now feels like a part of you. The people you thought you would never get to know, and even tried to escape from, become friends, and the customs and social nuances you thought would elude you until the end of time begin to piece themselves together. After a little while of patient and careful study, you start to recognize the patterns, then you learn the reasoning behind them, and eventually you love this new place and its strange people. And it doesn’t feel so new and they don’t seem so strange. You even see a little bit of yourself in them.
Sometimes we must, in faith, simply carry on.
One night in late summer when my departure from England was looming, Alice and Lizzy and I lay side by side on a blanket in the backyard under the stars. I had just accepted a job in Nashville, Tennessee, that started in late September. I would be leaving in the fall, but we weren’t thinking about that yet. We were celebrating a job. A real-life adult job. All six eyes looked up at the sky through the limbs of an apple tree. Someone said something funny that sent one of us rolling, and the rest of us laughed at her hysterical laughter. And then, we just kept laughing and laughed and laughed. We laughed and looked up through the tree until the night grew too cool to be outside anymore. I felt so at home there, then, that night. Like that was my place and those were my people. It may have taken me a year to get there, but all of that time, the tears and yearning and questions and homesickness, all of it felt worth it for that one moment and that one burst of laughter.
8
If I Forget You, O Jerusalem
One day in early February when England was so so cold, I traveled from Oxford to London by car with Jisu, a Canadian, an American, and an Englishman. We sat, knees high, in a too tiny vehicle for the five of us, and I hid my hangover as best I could. I had nearly not come because of this hangover. The night before involved wine, lots of wine, and talking about theology and religion with my friends from school. I had learned by then that wine helped me during nights like these, when I felt out of place, when I couldn’t decide if I should be honest about my faith and speak up or simply sit back and watch the conversation unfold. If I was feeling uncomfo
rtable in my own skin, in who I was among these people who were not like me, wine helped. It helped quite a bit. So it had been a night of overconsumption, and I woke up feeling the aftereffects.
Comfortable under my duvet in the early morning light, I formed my cancellation text. “Jisu,” it said, “I’m so sorry. I can’t go to this Christianity and art conference in London with you today. I just woke up, and I think I might be getting sick ” I stared at the unsent text for a long time, still under the covers. I couldn’t send it. It was a lie, and Jisu was a friend. I was ashamed of my hangover, and this was a Christian conference. I needed to attend as promised.
I forced myself out of bed and into some warm clothing, and then into some more warm clothing. February in Oxford requires many layers. I paid little attention to my hair or makeup and began the walk downstairs to the kitchen. The walk got slower and slower, and the kitchen got farther and farther away.
Seriously, since when is the kitchen so far from my bedroom? I thought. Since when did we have so many stairs on our staircase? I will never survive this. I will die on the tenth step if I don’t puke everywhere first. Puke. Ugh. Do not think about puking.
I needed everything: my bed, warmth, a clear head, a settled stomach, energy. Any amount of energy would do.
After lots of tiny steps with long pauses in between, I made it to the kitchen. Coffee was out of the question. Everything edible and drinkable was vomit inducing. I found some butter crackers in the cupboard and forced them down, afraid they would just come right back up. Stop thinking about puking. Eat the crackers.
English Lessons Page 9
