Three Autumns.

or "post to keep my suitcase heart at bay."

I’ve just woken up from something of a vision.

In the vision I was at an American grocery store. I was shopping for cheese. After finding the cheese I wanted I stepped out of the store and into the evening autumn air, my flannel protecting me from the chill. I got into a green car and went about doing the things I normally do. The vision ended there. Rather, I forced it to end. It was too painful. It was all too painful to remind myself that it’s autumn all over America, and that I live in a place where it’s hot and humid and rainy every single day of the season.

I used to not like autumn so much. When I was a child I associated it with stagnation; the freedom of summer was over and I had to once again rebuild the self-discipline that my summer was spent destroying with plays and friends and staying up until three in the morning for no reason. I even solidified a certain hatred for it in 2007, when it became associated with the figurative death that only suburban angst, community college, and existential loneliness can bring. But then something changed: One august afternoon, I got into a car and moved to Kirksville. It was only about 200 miles away, but it felt like a different world. And suddenly the autumn took new symbolism in the abundance of life that the season would bring me. For three consecutive years, the falling of the leaves and the donning of the flannel and putting on gloves for the first time of the year was directly correlated with the making of new friends, and of god opening up for me a new season of growth and of plenty and life filling up with wonder and contentment and joy to the point of bursting. Whenever I think of autumn, I think of just how broken I was three years ago. How much I depended on myself, and how meaningless everything in life felt, and how I didn’t really want to get through the rest of my life feeling so alone. And how in each of these three autumns, God put people in my life and used them to begin to destroy all the parts of me that I had made to protect myself and defend myself and feel secure and as though I could make it all on my own. It would get almost unbearably cold, but my life was full. Never, ever underestimate the power of kindness.

Our first week here we talked about the ways God speaks to us. There are a lot of ways, but the one that stuck out to me was “coincidence”. I relate to it because I look back at the last three autumns, and each of them is marked with coincidental happenings that ended up twisting my entire life up in the lives of people who were strangers at the time but who I now call family. And it wasn’t perfect, and there were things that I would have done differently, but I think of that scared eighteen-year-old-boy who was so hungry to feel worth something and to know that he was built for something more noble than bathing his brain cells in dopamine. The worth and purpose I was looking for I found in the following command: “love the Lord your God more than anything, and love other people just as much as you love yourself.” And this seemed to me at the time like a quaint true maxim that was contrary to my nature and altogether very simple. Taken at face value it doesn’t really mean anything. But then through a series of events I’m still trying to piece together myself, it became clear to me. The key word in this command seems to be love. And at the time I didn’t really know what that was. I thought love was what you felt when you did a good job and everyone told you they were proud of you, or the feelings you feel when you look at a pretty girl, or any other number of quantifiable statistics and figures that you can look at as empirical evidence for value. And oh, dear children, how wrong I got proven over and over again, each autumn serving as something of a loving slap in the face to all the lies I had chosen to believe. And it brought me to this point where I could actually trust God enough to follow him here, to a place where there is no autumn. The only difference is that the dirty rain insists on beating a little bit harder each day, and the extra humidity that accompanies it.

And part of me misses it all so much, but there’s this part of me that is filled with contentment. This contentment comes from my realization only now that it was never the weather that made those autumns so special. It was always the people, and always God. And it’s those same things that I find both in this place and in the traces and people of my life from those three autumns that continue to weave their way through my life even still. And there is a peace that comes from that, that the good that God is doing is only increasing with time.

Even if I’m still praying for an envelope of fallen Kirksville leaves.

This post is dedicated to the people I’m referring to in this post, who will know that it’s them by a slight nagging suspicion that it might be them.