By Margaret Wilson

I'm missing the Shire.

Without realizing it and with only a vague idea of even wanting it, I set out on this journey in April of 2008.  It began with visiting a place I'd vowed never again to go.  It works out like that a lot, I've learned—upside down and backward.  I went, with my mother and my son, to the dilapidated, five-years-empty house of my grandparents.  That house is the foundation, the origin, the substance of my early life.  When they died, and when the house fell into disrepair, I made the decision not to go back; I wanted my memories unsullied by the reality of what it had become.  Even so, there I was going.  And true to the inside-out nature of things, I found it not alien but familiar; not forbidding but welcoming.  I found joy there in the midst of the decay.

God gave me back Mama Esther and Daddy Clyde's house, in a way.  The stubborn clinging to its memory was unsatisfactory; now I understand that its reality rests within me rather than on the side of a highway in Silver Creek, Georgia.  In letting it go, I found that I have it still.

And so the journey started:  with a loss I'd never really mourned but which was no longer fresh enough to bleed.  I encountered the gentleness of God, the invitation into a life very different from any I'd ever pondered.

I asked God to reintroduce me to my heart, now that it was softened.  I asked for healing of past injuries.  I began to learn how to accept His grace.  That is my journey—learning to be more like the little girl who ran and roamed through that childhood house; she was free and bold and innocent.  I am learning to take the risk of vulnerability, of trust.  I am learning; God is teaching.

This new way of living changes everything.  I can see God in more places and in more people.  I can sometimes even remember to see God in unpleasantness and discomfort.  But home feels different; old familiarities and settled touchpoints are less reliable than I once found them.   I look around and see all the new and good and exciting things, and sometimes I mourn the old comfort and insulation.  It will work out better than I can imagine.  I suspect it will involve letting go of something that isn't really mine to hold onto.  And finding out that it is for me to have after all. 

For now, I'm Frodo, thrust into an adventure I knew I must undertake—even wanted to undertake.  But I'm missing the Shire.
 
Mags

20 October 2008