It happened.

I’m sitting here at my computer, not sure what to write. It’s been a long time since I wrote here, but it finally struck me that it’s time. I’ll never be ‘ready’, but it’s time to push myself and start unpacking what happened. 

6 months ago, I wrote in this blog about the phrase, “It’s okay,” and how often we misuse it. Many times, what we really mean is that we’re powerless to change a situation, so we cover it up by saying it’s okay. Many times, it’s not okay. So I believe it’s important to acknowledge, in those circumstances, that it’s not okay–whether we can do anything about it or not. I also believe that telling stories is a powerful way to say it’s not okay… It’s a way to look at an unjust situation or experience and not allow it to have power over you. 

So today I want to tell a story. Whether anyone ever reads it or not, I want to take this opportunity to say: It happened. 

In the summer of 2012, after an amazing junior year of college at Belmont University, I applied on a whim to a program called Mission Year. Mission Year is essentially a faith-based volunteer program that allows young people to move into a city and live in intentional Christian community and learn what it means to love God and love people in an urban context. I didn’t apply to this program because I was unhappy at Belmont or because I was incapable of doing excellent work there. I just applied. And a series of doors opened for me so I decided to follow God into a weird and beautiful adventure of a year. 

So on August 31st, 2012, after a lot of talking, praying, and asking my best friends and family for their blessing, I moved to Houston, TX for 11 months. I worked at a community center, I volunteered with my church, and I spent a lot of time with my neighbors and 7 housemates. I cried a lot, I learned a lot, I worked a lot, and I laughed. A LOT. Last year was the most difficult, wonderful, and transformative year of my life. It’s a very complicated thing to try and explain.

Among us Mission Year kids, we often joked about being “war survivors.” We’d often wonder, as a group, how anyone who goes through Mission Year could end up marrying someone who didn’t (shout out to Carly and Carter Abel!) because how could your spouse ever really understand what you went through? It’s hard to explain why such a beautiful, wonderful experience can still feel so much like a war we survived. I guess it’s just the classic story of growth–there’s the painful pruning that precedes new growth. But we experienced spiritual grooming and growth at an unnatural rate. Under such strange and unique circumstances, we went through more of a blender than a gentle pruning. The result was huge transformation with a great deal of pain alongside it. My time in Houston was an emotional workout and my muscles are still very sore from it. 

It literally takes my breath away to try and fathom the fact the I spent a year of my life in that place doing those things. Probably a hundred walks across the bridge to Ecclesia. HUNDREDS of bus rides. Dozens of new friends (and family members, really). Maybe a dozen different furniture arrangements in the living room 😛 And the sweat. I have no idea how I could measure the amount of sweat we each expended last year… After the daily walk to work, weekly prayer walks and grocery trips, Sunday afternoons playing volleyball or chess with homeless friends at the park, hours of dodgeball and basketball and soccer with the kids, dance parties with the neighbors, frequent jogs, mile-long walks to the Washateria, afternoons in the garden, setting up chairs at church, and the mile or so between the bus stop and church (all in Houston’s finest heat and humidity), how could I ever measure the sweat? And really, how many days of our lives did we spend waiting on Houston Metro? 

There are a few very specific aches that go along with the transition back to college.

One is the feeling that last year didn’t happen. 99 out of 100 times here, I’m the only person in the room who spent last year in Houston doing Mission Year. So naturally, the collective mindset is that last year happened in Nashville and I was absent. On the contrary, my personal experience is that last year happened in Houston, and as much as I tried to keep up with Nashville, it was still distant. As much as they love and support me, many of my friends here just aren’t (and probably shouldn’t be expected to be) consciously aware that the last year of my life happened. As a result, I sometimes feel strangely isolated, and maybe even a little forgotten. 

Another little source of pain is my lost reputation. The fact is that I worked hard at Belmont for 3 years. I participated in many ensembles, earned excellent grades, and grew as a performer, vocalist, and songwriter. I made friends and endured the everyday pains and frustrations of cultivating relationships. I experienced some successes in music and survived some failures (can anyone say “junior departmental”?). And then I went away for a year and most people forgot about me. Here I am, back at school, and most of the key players in my everyday life have no recollection of who I was or what I did. They don’t care that I ‘put in time’ to try and build a modest reputation at school. To them, I’m just a new kid. I guess it’s a good reminder of how irrelevant and fleeting our reputations can be. But it still doesn’t feel good when an instrumentalist repeatedly bails on me without notice because I’m not ‘popular’ enough to put on the calendar. 

Finally (for now), I struggle with how my priorities have shifted and are now a bit different from my peers’. I think it’s safe to say that knowing a popular band’s full repertoire is markedly less important to me than investing time in my friends now. Yet I’ve been scolded (and a bit embarrassed) many times this semester for not knowing a song that everyone else seems to know. I’m also quite sensitive to certain types of humor now, though many of my peers aren’t bothered by it; in fact, they often feel judged or frustrated that I don’t find it funny. I promise that I love to laugh and I am trying to be less sensitive in some areas! But I also won’t be swayed when it comes to using humor that dehumanizes an individual or group (particularly the homeless, minorities, or homosexuals). 

Friends and family, please bear with me as I process the transition back into my old life. Rather, it’s a transition into NEW life in an OLD setting. Maybe that’s the most confusing part for me. But thank you for reading along and allowing me to acknowledge that it happened.