to continue on.

I'm going home tomorrow. For the first time in four months. My home, my hometown, my favorite places, all of my closest family and friends. My dog.

I'm smiling.

As I think about going home, the memory of all of that contrasts sharply with the reality of all of this. My life in southern Missouri. It shouldn't, really. I've kept close contact with family and friends from home. If I've changed, it hasn't been in isolation. This blog represents only a small fraction of the total processing of my experiences. I'm not unaware of the changes.

And yet. I'm nervous. Just the tiniest bit.

My life is here now. I count as friends people who are within the Religious Right that my friends at home (and I) have derided so often in the past. I now participate in a culture so wholly other from where I came that I often wonder what would happen if I brought my peer groups together.

Those on either side might read this, and bristle. Might think that I'm making too much of the divide. Creating significant differences where there really aren't. That's probably true on the surface. But the reality is that to dig down, and not just respect, but understand and appreciate each culture, takes more than most in each side are willing to give.

I treasure my life at James River. I mean that. The use of the word "treasure" is not just an artifact of our culture's affinity for verbal exaggeration, or a misunderstanding of the term. I use it intentionally. I treasure the sermons, and the friends, and my Tuesday afternoons in the atrium. They are of great value to me, as they aided in, and represent, something far greater. I think fondly of JRA. I would (and do) go to bat fairly often to defend the church, and its people.

But my experiences here are things that can not be fully understood by some of my friends from home. And in that sense, a large part of my life has become inaccessible to those with whom I have always been the most accessible. Though I can attempt to explain, and they are brilliantly intuitive, there are moments, and themes, and understandings that might not ever break upon them in the same way.

"I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion."

It seems that there is a point in this journey from which you continue on without men. That to move closer to God is not the complete exclusion of mortal relations, but the understanding that some steps can't be taken amongst men, they are necessarily moments of crisis.