Mile Marker

on my body

I am writing from Lakewood Brewing company this afternoon. The writing was planned but the location for the writing not so much. The discovery of the location has become a game I play. I just pull out my phone and let Google tell me what’s near by. Today, after leaving the church, I got halfway to the house and decided that today was a day for playing Google Tell Me Where to Go. So in the middle of Northwest Highway, at a stoplight, I pulled out my phone and entered Where Can I Write and Have a Pilsner?

Lakewood Brewing Company was the number one hit so here I am, at 12:34 on a random Saturday, drinking Stubb’s pilsner and eating hummus with carrot sticks. Eighties rock and roll is playing, a lady is doing micro tattoos on a pink tattoo table, a dude is selling vintage vinyl records, and I’m pretty sure I am going to join the Lion’s Den so I can get some cool swag and access to the club room.

I’m also probably gonna get a micro tattoo. They’re only $30 today and the tattoo artist is wearing my favorite pair of platform Converse. Super hip. Super cool. Super all the things I am not. A year ago I told myself I’d get no more tattoos until I landed employment. Basically, my internal dialogue went something like this:

If I work at the church, no more tattoos for 5 years. Or until I’ve earned trust and credibility and found to be theologically conservative, seen as plain vanilla, and understood to be a middle-aged mom who likes to express herself artistically.

If I work at a para-church organization, no more tattoos until I see a fellow co-worker with more than one. And then I’ll still wait a year just to make sure it’s acceptable.

But if I land work at a brewery, wine shop, or coffee shop, well then Francis, it’s Katie, Bar the Door. I’m gonna get one as soon as I sign an offer letter.

Anyway, I signed an offer letter with a coffee shop three hours ago. Guess who’s going home with an itty-bitty tattoo today? Yep. It’s me.

I know it seems I’m making light of the whole job situation, but I’m really not. I’ve spent months and months looking at the landscape of my current reality and prayerfully weighing my options. I’ve fluffed up my ministry resume, knocked on doors, and interviewed. I’ve cried in the car and lost nights of sleep. I’ve talked with a chaplain, a spiritual director, two trusted friends, and Thad. It’s been a laborious, humbling few months of understanding facts and then accepting reality.

You guys know I love a road trip. I do my best thinking behind the wheel of my car. Since moving to Dallas, my little car hasn’t gone more than 45 miles an hour. It hasn’t even driven a straight line out to the middle of nowhere just to turn around and come back. Life has also been so busy with people that I’ve not had time or space to plumb the depths of my soul—I’ve been just barely skimming the surface—never finding resolve or conclusion or equanimity. In eight months, I’ve become rather splintered. I’ve lost my footing. I’ve begun to function like a machine.

And I am the opposite of a machine.

On Tuesday, Greenley and I woke before light and began the 17 hour trek across the country to move Isaac into college. We drove 12 hours on Wednesday before stopping in Knoxville, TN for sushi and a cheap room that smelled like someone had been cooking curry for 17 days straight. I love curry but I don’t want to sleep in it. I’d have asked for a refund but it was the only room available in Knoxville so we suffered through our 5 hour sleep session and woke on Wednesday to flash flood warnings and torrential downpours in eastern TN.

If you’ve never driven through eastern TN in the daylight when the sky is ablaze with the sun’s glory and the horizon is a cascade of green against a blue backdrop, then you need to remedy that before the end of the year. If you go in October, everything green will be shades of red, yellow, and orange and you will think you have died and seen glory.

To say I was disappointed to wake on Wednesday to a torrential downpour and black skies would be an understatement. I was gutted. I had planned our trip so that we would arrive in Bristol, TN just as the sun was coming up. I wanted to see the clouds rise from the valley of the mountains. I wanted to see the mist around each curve in the road. I wanted to watch the sky wake up. I wanted to be reminded of my smallness in the presence of enormous majesty.

I wanted to see beauty. I wanted my heart to catch in my throat. I wanted to feel something other-worldly deep down in me and I wanted that feeling to roll down my face.

Because it was dark and raining and we were both talked out and tired, Greenley and I drove, in near silence, from Knoxville to Cookeville to Bristol where, to our surprise, the sky just dried up. It was nearing 9am, still late for a sunrise view, but still early enough for the remnant of light hidden behind cloud cover to make the sky streak with ribbons of pink and orange. Through the windshield of the car, we watched as the mist from the valleys blew upwards, breaking up over the smaller mountain peaks and then watched again as the NC mountains came into view. After an hour or so of highway driving, our navigation system led us to a two-lane road that took us straight into Lynchburg, VA.

The road was hairpin curved, each turn of the pavement hugging a pasture, a drop-off, or a front lawn. The speed dropped to 35 miles and hour, except around every curve where 20 miles an hour was needed to keep the car between the lines. Beauty surrounded the car on both sides and I could feel my heart catch in my throat.

For one minute, I imagined I was in Valle Crucis, NC on a solo road trip looking for God among the evergreens, the pines, the rhododendron. For every other minute, I imagined God looking for me and finding me sitting on the back deck of a cabin in Boone, NC not wanting to leave the comfort of the forest. And I imagined him sitting with me for a good long bit before whispering what I already knew to be true:

You can visit, but my best for you is not found here right now.

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Last week, I moved Isaac into college. I took a road trip with my last baby. I saw beauty and felt in deep down in my body until it rolled down my face. I invited God into my internal wrestling and asked a bunch of questions I’d been meaning to ask. I made peace with the undercurrent of unrest that’s been plaguing me for months. I prayerfully dug up a seed of bitterness before it took root. I named a few disappointments, some points of injustice, and the ways I felt slighted in my search for meaningful work that provided for my family and enabled me to flourish and take flight. I said no to one job so I could, with great joy, say yes to another.

But mostly, I let my soul come out of hiding long enough for the Spirit to tell me who I am becoming in this season of life.

I imagine you’re curious to know what fresh ink I spontaneously added to my embodied soul. I got three little pine trees under a rising sun. It’s on the back of my right arm, right above the elbow, where I will rarely catch sight of it. But I know it’s there, a bodily memorial stone of how God met me in both my holy imagination and in the vastness of the Blue Ridge mountains.

Here’s a blurry photo of my little happy trees.