For When You’ve Lost Your Actual Life and Have to Make a New One
Jen Hatmaker wrote yesterday about missing her actual life, meaning her life at home with her people, the ones she knows intimately, lives with, sees face to face in the everyday, rather than her life as a traveling speaker and an online presence who connects with people via the Internet.
Her words resonated with me, with one major difference: she has something I don’t. She has the power to make some key decisions about her time, reduce her travel commitments, and get back to her actual life. She didn’t move across the country from it.
I don’t mean to sound bitter or envious, because the truth is that I’m thankful. Her post woke me up to the fact that I’ve been living as though I’m just temporarily away from my actual life. And that’s not true. This life, the one I’m living here in Virginia, is my actual life.
And yes, while I would very much like to wake up on a Saturday morning and head for the Fulton Street Farmers Market or Wealthy Street Bakery for coffee with my dear friend Sarah, the reality is that I can’t. Although I’d love to load my beach chair and bookbag into the back of my truck on Friday afternoons and head over to the lake with L, it’s no longer an option. I can’t schedule dinner with my Cooking Club. I can’t take off for an afternoon of browsing my favorite shops in Easttown. I can’t plan a day of crafting with my friend Michelle. I live here now. And in all likelihood, I’m here to stay.
I loved Grand Rapids. Of all the places I’ve lived (not that there are that many), it was the place that felt the most like home to me from the very first day. I loved everything about living there, even in the dead of winter. And of course, it’s where I met E, so it kind of feels like life really started there.
In my gut, I know we’re where we’re supposed to be. God says he has plans for us (Jer. 29:11) and he’s made it pretty clear that this is the plan. But if I’m being honest, I think I’ve subconsciously put some parts of my life on hold for the past year and a half. Deep down, I’ve felt almost paralyzed, unsure how to even begin tackling the mammoth task of making new friends, finding new favorite haunts. I’ve made a few half-hearted attempts to find a book club, to do some exploring outside a 10-mile radius of our apartment, but I never seem to get very far. I’ve had a couple of opportunities to make a new friend, and I’ve let them pass by. I’ve given a lot of lip service to the fact that I need to work on finding community, but I haven’t done a whole lot of follow-up.
It’s easy to let the weeks and months fly by when you work from home and have a toddler, easy to just stay home day in and day out, engaging only with your family. It’s easy to just go out to do the grocery shopping and run to Target or Costco and say you got out of the house. But I’m an extrovert, and I need a little more.
I’ve been doing relationships online a lot, via Facebook mostly, and after a while it’s not quite enough, this feeling loved from afar. I’m so grateful for how technology can help us stay close to the people we love when we can’t be with them in person, and of course I’ll keep maintaining my long-distance relationships. I couldn’t survive without regular Skype calls, phone calls, and messages with my sister in Hawaii, my sister-in-law and best friends back in Michigan and in Florida. But we all need real people to sit across the table from us, to look us in the eye and see who we are and where we’re at.
Because I make quarterly trips to Grand Rapids for work, I think I’ve also been postponing some of my need for face-to-face time with friends until it’s time to make one of those trips, and then I find myself cramming as much quality time as I can into every spare moment, trying to fill my tank so I can make it through the next four months. I’m thankful I have regular opportunities to see my friends and re-connect in person, but I also know it’s not helping me find balance in my actual life.
I don’t mean to sound ugrateful – we’re richly blessed in that we didn’t land here in Virginia completely alone. E’s brother and his family were waiting here to welcome us with open arms. And I could not have made it through this year with my sanity intact without my sister-in-law, Jen. She’s been my rock, my one in-person friend. But they’re leaving us in a few months to spend the next three years in Germany, and I need to stop relying only on Jen to fill my in-person friendship needs.
I have a friend in her 40s who wants to be married, but she really hasn’t done anything to make it happen. She says she knows God has the right person for her, and then she just keeps on going to work and going to church and repeating the same old patterns, and she is still single. She says she’s being patient and faithful, and I applaud that, but I also know that God asks us to step out in faith sometimes, so that he can bless that, so that he can orchestrate things. I want to remind her that sometimes you have to take risks, go somewhere you haven’t been before. Because let’s face it – the UPS guy doesn’t deliver husbands, and (preaching to myself here) he doesn’t deliver friends either.
One of my words for 2014 is Seek. So here and now, I’m committing to ending the lip service. I’m going to actively seek out an actual life here, one with living, breathing people other than my family in it. I know there’s one waiting – I just have to look for it. I have to stop grieving the old and dive into the new. I have to step out and take some risks, so that God can work.
What kinds of risks might God be asking you to take so he can work in your life?
Blessings,
