Far from home (Part II)

This weekend I am away from home…that is, away from my home at TCU, which is several hundred miles away from my home of Bloomington, Indiana. How has this happened? I don't know if I could say exactly how, but what I can say is that I am enjoying it.

When I last wrote I was still very anxious about being at Texas Christian University. I felt more than slightly dislocated and was trying to cope with my feelings of home-sickness and anxiety about a new place. After seeing family and friends at Christmas, my concerns have been greatly quieted. I feel that I am better able to cope this semester not only with the physical distance separating myself from Indiana, but also with the differing social mannerisms, economic policies, and political tolerance of a new place. After "testing the waters" I have come to view TCU as a real home…for at least 8 months of the year.

Now, I am spending a weekend in Austin, about a three to four hour drive from Fort Worth. And despite feeling anxious at first, I am oddly at ease. After being exposed to two or three largely different American cultures within my lifetime, I feel better prepared for changes in my environment…in many forms. Again, how this happened is pretty unclear, but that's a mystery that I will allow to be unsolved. All I do know about this transformation is that it was not easy. I would go so far as to call it my own jihad- my own struggle.

This week, as the beginning of Lent, has coincided nicely with my story. On Ash Wednesday and the following Thursday, I attended "Into the Wilderness: Beginning the Lenten Journey" which was largely the work of HELM Leadership Fellow Caroline Hamilton. I was able to walk a labyrinth several times during this time and reflect on the beginning of my Lenten journey. While walking the labyrinths, I was reminded of how lost and "in the wilderness" I had felt up until these past couple weeks. As I lay on my side in the center of the labyrinth, listening for God, a thought occurred to me: why am I trying to get out? The labyrinth is my wilderness, yet the most healing part of a labyrinth is in fact, within the center. When I came to TCU I felt as though I had been stranded in this strange Texas wilderness and that by somehow changing myself or things around me that I would be able to escape it. What I have come to realize is that I need not try to escape TCU by changing myself, because it only causes me unnecessary grief. I need to learn to love the wilderness, to embrace it, and to seek God hardest during times of metaphorical wilderness travel. And hopefully, just as TCU has become my home, so will other wildernesses that I encounter through my life.

When revisiting the wilderness story for this season of Lent, I have become increasingly aware of and attracted to the first verse of Chapter 4 of Matthew: "Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil." The most powerful of these words, to me are, "led by the spirit". I don't think that I happened to stumble upon the TCU community by chance, and I have faith that God has helped guide me to where I am today. God has helped give me a place in the wilderness, a privilege for which I am grateful. And along with this opportunity has come many newfound confidences and comforts in atmospheres I might previously have been uncomfortable in. And these lessons and skills I cannot help but remember and use for a lifetime.