My mom poked her head out the back door this morning to see the sunrise while I was sitting on the porch with my coffee, trying to be a Foreboding Presence to the robins who keep wanting to build a nest over the barbecue grill. Today is the weekend for her, and she likes to make big breakfasts on days like today but I at least got the coffee started since I was up first.
It’s little moments like these that make me grateful to live with my parents. No one I’ve met personally has ever given me grief for this, but you see a lot of disparaging things online about my generation and how we have no work ethic and eat too much avocado toast and need to move back home so mommy and daddy can support us.
But I wonder if the people who say those belittling things aren’t actually envious of those of us who have found and re-formed community with our families of origin. Of the support we offer one another, not transactionally but from a place of love and care and mutual respect. Of the healing we have found because we’ve all grown as people in the years we’ve been apart, and in the new years we now have together. Of the years ahead that I get to spend with them before they go Home.
So write your articles, make your jokes. I’m gonna go inside and see if there’s pancakes and bacon. . . . Accessibility description: The sun shines brightly behind an apple tree several hours after climbing over the Midwestern horizon. A red brick porch column lines the right side of the frame, connecting to a brick wall lining the bottom of the frame. The author’s camper van sits in the grass glistening with dew. There’s actually a gravel driveway under there but nature got ahead of them last year and it’s overgrown. Add that to the list of neverending spring chores.
The fields are bare now, ready to sleep for the long winter. We cook more soups as temperatures drop, watch more tv as the nights take up more hours of the earth’s rotation. I knit stitches on a sweater here, a hat there; pick up my phone to tap out thoughts to copy into a draft later. The work of life continues, but indoors and inwardly. It is a soft work, in which repentance and rest will be our salvation; in quietness and trust will be our strength (Isa. 30:15).
Around this time last year, I was leaving behind notes for the next program director at the college I worked at. No one had been hired yet by the time I left — a symptom of a larger issue I was relieved to step away from. Regardless, I had been itching to move on from the higher ed world for a while; longer than I had even realized myself at the time. I loved my students, even loved much of the work I did. But when my position changed during COVID, it was no longer a good fit for me. So, I gave my notice and set my sights on other pastures.
The plan was to strike out on my own. To freelance as a database designer (something I was skilled at and enjoyed as one piece of my multi-faceted job), travel around in my newly-purchased camper van, and live the digital nomad life. I would relocate to Indiana as a “home base” so I could help my parents out as needed, but be able to visit friends and see parts of my own country I hadn’t yet seen. Oh, and between all those things, I would also begin building something off the thesis I had written as the culmination of my master’s degree–ministry, resources, workshops. I was set to get started on all kinds of Very Important Things.
Reader, only one of those things has happened. I’m here. In Indiana. Home base. Learning to shift my perspectives, plans, and ambitions.
Plans always change, especially when we make a big move. We find that the needs and responsibilities in our new location are different than we envisioned. We find out certain skills don’t translate as well as we hoped. We lose momentum on things we were passionate about, because there are other needs to be met right in front of us.
A year later now, and part of me (well, much of me, to be honest) feels like I’ve lost the plot. Snide, inaudible comments hiss their way through my brain and if I am not careful, into my heart. Things like You have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. God helps those who help themselves — you’ll never prosper or get God’s favor and blessing if you just wait for things to be handed to you. He’ll only bless you if you’re doing His will, so you must be doing something wrong, or not doing enough. If you don’t have enough faith, God can’t work in your life. No one says these things directly (although they might repost a low-quality jpeg of it on facebook), and they are a poor and disappointing interpretation of Scripture. But it feels like this “must” be what people secretly think when they look at me. Like I’m supposed to be making something of myself, doing all those Very Important Things, and having some kind of outsized impact for the kingdom.
But good grief. What a lot of pressure, and from no one in particular; it’s just a nagging sense of dread, a fear of being exposed as some kind of fraud. Like a spiritual impostor syndrome.
I mean, maybe someone will “find me out” someday. They’ll find that instead of building databases, I’m building compost bins and plowing dirt so we can grow our own food. They’ll find my parents are grateful for me to be back. They’ll discover that instead of making money for someone else, I’m stumbling my way through writing books and crafting things to sell on Etsy so I can support myself by doing things I love. They’ll find that yeah, maybe I’ve lost momentum on the #MeToo project for now, but they’ll also find that I refuse to let it fizzle out because I believe it’s too important for the Church to ignore.
Ultimately though, as hard as it is for me to believe sometimes, those poisonous lies of God must be so disappointedin you are arrows from behind enemy lines. And what anyone glimpses on the outside is not the full picture of what God sees. People are only casual observers–He does the work in me, far beyond what even I’m aware of. It’s not their opinion that matters–it’s His. There’s only one throne before which I will stand on the Last Day, and it doesn’t belong to anyone who is in just as much need of grace as I am. Nor does it belong to that devil who was crushed forever beneath the heel of King Jesus.
So, I do the best I can with what I have. For now, I’ll lead a quiet life, mind my own business, and work with my hands. Just make hay while the sun shines.
It is the very first question God posed to Adam in the Garden as he walked there in the cool of the day. The question is explored in the second chapter of A Curious Faith by Lore Ferguson Wilbert, which was recommended to me several months ago by a dear friend. In the opening pages, Wilbert highlights how we are all born into a place, a culture, a time in history. We are born into a family, we live and work, we form and are being formed by the places in which we find ourselves. She poses the idea that before we can really know who we are, we first need to know where we are.
So…where am I? Logistically, it’s quite simple: I’m in Indiana, house sitting for some friends. But like many things in life, the real answer, the deeper answer, is far more nuanced than what’s on the surface.
Flip back through the calendar, and two months ago I was still living in upstate New York, transitioning out of an unfulfilling, unsuitable-for-me job and letting myself dream about who I might like to be in the world now. Flip forward in the planner, and in a few weeks my friends will return and I will shift into the next phase of the reasons I moved back to Indiana.
Widen the scope even more, and the place and age I occupy on this planet becomes more complex. Complex, like flavor notes in a good coffee or wine – – not complicated like the knots of Christmas tree lights that must be untangled no matter how nicely you put them away the year before.
I was born into two cultures, not one. And although the American part of me is the more dominant of the two, I cannot separate from or be who I am without the Filipino part of me. My last name only goes back one generation due to my dad being adopted; the bloodline may stretch back into parts of western Europe, but I belong to the family who gave us this new name. I also carry my mother’s maiden name, the sound of which echoes the era of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines–yet the DNA ancestry kit unveils the “99% Southeast Asian, Malay, Filipino” lineage that also courses through my veins.
My childhood was tied to this Midwestern plain, but my entire adult life has been spent on planes, trains, and automobiles: Going to college in New York, moving overseas to teach English, traveling wherever my savings and time off would let me, returning to New York, hiking and cycling all over the Northeast…it is admittedly quite an adjustment to be back in the land that raised me. Even so, it is only a home base; a jumping off point for the places my van will take me as I develop the dreams I have had on my heart for so long.
So where am I? I guess it comes back to being ever “at-large.” But for now, this is my where. This is me.
Angela At-Large 