By: JANA GREENE
My husband and I like to spend a week in the mountains of North Carolina each year around our anniversary. We have been coming to the same little cabin for our whole marriage, which turns 18 next week. Eighteen years of marriage now, which I guess makes our relationship “grown.” It certainly did come with growing pains.
The little town where we visit is just a typical hamlet in the South – with a general store that still sells pickled beets canned by the owner’s wife, and an adorable “downtown” trying very hard to become trendy and bougie, lest it fall into disrepair. Candle shops line the streets, a few breweries, even a haberdashery, where you can buy an expensive hat, should you have the occasion to wear one around here.
Anybody else would get bored. There’s kind of nothing to “do” here. No good restaurants, even. We keep coming back because throughout nearly 20 years of marriage that had survived blending a family of three teen girls, job changes, kid drama, becoming grandparents, and scary diagnosises, this is where we “right” ourselves. We grew up here, as a couple.
It’s the same.
It’s where we reset.
The allure here is nature – often to sit out on the back porch and listen to the creek, many steps down the side of the hill. To watch the daily festoonery of fall leaves as they turn. We talk. We listen to music. We wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. This town is the same every year, pandemics and elections notwithstanding.
It occurs to me as we drove to breakfast this morning, it is easy to “right yourself” in this small town. If I’m not paying attention, I could lose my way. But look – there is the tractor supply store. And ahead is the antique store, it’s offerings exactly the same as a decade ago. There’s a trailhead. There’s a coffee shop. There is the Walmart. Same as it ever was. “Same” steers us to safety.
But the world that has swirled over the course of 18 years is no longer the same place, and I am finding it difficult to right myself in it. There are not enough falling leaves and pickled beets to mitigate the loss of democracy.
Reminiscent of when we were children and we’d fall asleep on the sofa, we would sometimes wake up in a different room, someone having moved us in our sleep, and for a split second, we experience the “WHERE AM I?” panic. We open our eyes and look for things to right ourselves. Landmarks.
Oh, that’s my bedside table, we might think. I’m home. I’m safe. I’m okay.
But for the first time in history, We the People are not able to right ourselves. Our landmarks have been demolished – the checks and balances that were to keep absolute power from corrupting absolutely – gone. The benevolence of a government, scrapped. I feel like I fell asleep in my nice, safe house, and woke up in The Upside Down.
And jarred out of sleep, nothing looks familiar here, in the swirling world we find ourselves in.
“”WHERE AM I” I panic. Yet no stabilizing force comes to assure me. This is the “new normal” now. This is what happens when We the People prop up dictators, when they cut off their noses to spite the face of liberty, and so down we all go. I’m having a hard time accepting that half the country voted for what will become unprecedented suffering of what Jesus called “the least of these.” And they did it in the name of god. And Jesus wept.
Nobody is coming to our rescue – we were the ones who could have changed this trajectory. “Same” is supposed to steer us to safety, only the wheels are of entirely and Jesus ain’t at the wheel. There is a heaviness to this “reset,” I’m afraid. And I guess that’s why we are not to trust in the things we can see, because perhaps not even the things we can see are safe.
Perhaps hope is the safety. Perhaps we don’t lose our way, so long as we can keep that spark alive. We must lean into each other without leaning on our own understanding. Until we can orient ourselves in this changing world again. Let’s try hard to persevere, lest we all fall into disrepair of Spirit.
Perhaps in this land where nothing seems familiar, this is our reset. We are one another’s “familiar.”
Oh, there’s my friend. I’m safe. I’m okay.
Amen.
Words by Jana Greene 
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