“How can you leave your family like that?”
—
I’m sitting in the Oklahoma City International Airport (which doesn’t, to my best knowledge, have any international destinations), with a suit jacket draped over the chair next to me.1 I’m flying out of state for a job interview today; I shaved last night but failed to get a haircut, and my hair is currently in the form of what I like to call a “polite mullet,” which is a courteous way of saying it is a mullet that’s kind of trying to blend in and go incognito. But still, it’s a mullet.
It’s dark outside, just past six a.m. on one of the shortest days of the year. I’m reading an advent devotional, and each one is pregnant with six a.m. darkness, all of it waiting for the dawn.
We are each, in some way or another, waiting for the dawn in our lives, waiting for something that we aren’t quite sure exists but really hope does. For me, I’m waiting for purpose. Not capital-P Purpose (loving God, loving others, etc.) but lower p-purpose. This past year has been an occupational search for purpose after walking through a long season of exhaustion. I ask myself, what am I going to do with my one wild and crazy life, or whatever Mary Oliver said in that one poem?
I want purpose to break through the clouds like the plane I’m about to board will—dazzling, grand, expansive. Somedays I believe it will. Others (many, many others), I doubt it exists.
So that’s why I find myself sitting here with a suit coat draped over the seat next to me, waiting for my plane and waiting for the sun.
—
“How can you leave your family like that?”
—
I am now high above the Colorado plains, sitting on the wing of a Southwest flight. The sun is at its apex, and my body can sense the future barreling towards me.
“How can you leave your family like that?”
That was someone from Oklahoma talking to me when I told her about my possible move.
She’s right. It feels like a crass thing to do. I don’t know. I mean, my grandfather lives forty minutes away from me, eighty-eight and still working full time at his furniture store. Two of my cousins live in that same town—two weeks ago I went to an Oklahoma City Thunder game with one of them. He’s a pastor, and we talked about Wendell Berry; he invited me to preach a sermon at his church—the one my grandad attends—about Berry and the Gospel. I had to tell him it might be complicated to schedule because I was possibly moving across the country.
Am I too busy chasing after a career? Am I backwards in my desires? Am I too self-centered to stay around Oklahoma, to stay near family, to continue collecting memories like the old tractors in my grandad’s barns?
—
“How can you leave your family like that?”
—
Here’s my confession: all I want is to be back in the nest. I want to be a first grader again, bringing my mom to my first day of school and looking at the classroom with her. I want to ride in the backseat of the light-blue, tintless-windowed Sienna, headed to Wal-Mart or the lady on campus who cuts my hair or to the zoo on a field trip. I want my peanut butter jelly to be cut diagonally, and I want to share apple slices with her or powdered sugar donuts with my dad.
But I am thirty-one-years-old. I do not belong to my family in the same way I did as a child. They are still my family, to be sure, but they are a bit more removed now. If, as a kid, we were a perfect circle, now we are a Venn diagram. We still overlap and have much in common, but our circles no longer lay perfectly on top of one another. I have my life independent of them, and they have lives independent of me. For the past year, I’ve been trying to cram the circles back together, and my parents have gently but firmly reminded me that this separateness is natural, normal, good.
And my career is not in Oklahoma. They reminded me of that too.2
—
“How can you leave your family like that?”
—
Back to advent and waiting. In the pregnancy of the wait, in the growing and the bloating, there is heaps of discomfort and confusion. The six a.m. darkness rests heavy on each of us. For me, it’s this trip out of state. For you it’s probably something else. But regardless of what *it* is, it is uncomfortable, I am sure.
I believe, however, just like in Genesis 1, that the Spirit hovers over the darkness and the waiting.
Somedays I believe this through gritted teeth, sitting on a plane with a mind whirring with anxiety. Other days I am able to hold onto it like I did my mom’s hand on the first day of first-grade, checking out that classroom.
It is not easy, this growing up thing, this life thing. It is not. So much of it is waiting for the sun. But I have to believe waiting is a worthy investment, something that builds faithfulness and trust and peace and all the other beautiful words God—our great parent—gently and firmly speaks over us.
Did you know that the Oklahoma City International Airport is named after a man who died in a plane crash? Did you know that another airport in the state is named after the man flying the plane that the man who Oklahoma City International Airport is named after died in? It’s true. Sometimes you can’t make these things up.
It is here, once again, that I must acknowledge my own privilege. Like .000000000001% of the world gets to talk about passion and occupation in the same breath. I don’t want to pretend like I am some suffering servant living in a world that forces me to work for money. No. That is the reality for so many people. To be able to speak otherwise is a privilege.
This is so suspiciously relatable.
I loved this so much. So comforting knowing we are all deep down feeling those same aches. Keep writing! I read every single post.