The Honor of Walking With

So, here I am walking. Walking with people I've loved for nearly a decade and others who I am just getting to know. I'm telling all of them I love them. The "I love you's" ending nearly every conversation with nearly every person I interact with; we that are walking this Covenant road. The depth I need in order to love isn't the point right now, everyone's eyes carrying a similar burden, so personal and yet so collective.

Us Shays started the school year with a trauma all of our own. At the end of September we experienced an unraveling that we hadn't quite been able to resolve before March 27th came along, it still hangs awkwardly in the air. The personal matter of what happened is something not so easy to talk about and I'm not ready to go into detail. But it shook us all, threw me into a survival tail spin, and left us without a church home. Our church that we called ours for 13 years couldn't handle our situation, couldn't handle our need. And so, we stepped away, so very sadly. I was drowning, needing extra support, and there wasn't any there for me, for us. It's been tender. I didn't have many who I could look at in the eye, disclose the whole story, and find understanding. It was lonely.

All of the recent text messages and voicemails I have from Katherine Koonce were talking me through and encouraging me in pressing into the mess we had found ourselves living with. I wasn't interested in running away, even while we were stepping away, and she helped show me how to do that. As we were in the process of losing our church, she knew it all and she entered in, of course she did. The Covenant School was the church to us, Rock's school was the church to us, our close friends in this city filling the gaping holes of what church means in the first place. 

We were actually hoping to go back to our church for the first time since September over Easter, working to make amends, working toward reconciliation, trying to regain a bit of what was lost. But then we went to four Easter funerals instead. Our safe church place and our safe school place not feeling the same anymore. All at once the places I've walked and sat and delighted in are suddenly not what they used to be. And oddly, I somehow feel more belonging in my story than I ever have. The physical places no longer holding the power of community, but people themselves presenting their beauty and strength at every turn. 

Life is so messy, humanity unpredictable. The layers we carry are real and valid and for The Covenant School community, we now have a big thick layer on top of what was already going on. Whether life was heavy or light, our days making us feel stuck or like things were smooth and we were making progress, we now have a jolt in those stories. The older I get the more grey situations appear, without a black and white buttoned up answer. I'm learning to hold the grey for myself, so I can hold it for the whole damn beautiful world. How can I honor the reality I've been given? I will walk with myself, I will walk with others, I will walk until I can't anymore.