Almost There: Searching for Home in a Life on the Move - Softcover

DiFelice, Bekah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 163146471X ISBN 13: 9781631464713

Publisher: NavPress Publishing Group, 2017

Synopsis

Recipient of Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review!
On the move . . . again? Wondering when you will “arrive”?

Sometimes God leads people out of familiar territory so he can tell them who they are. That moment you depart, you experience reinvention, renewal, and freedom. You get a redo on the adjectives associated with your name.

Almost There is for those on the move and those who feel restless right where they are. It’s for those who struggle with not belonging, with feeling unsettled, with believing that home is out of their reach, at least for the moment. And Almost There is for those who find themselves in a transient lifestyle they didn’t expect—say, moving across the country for a new job or the military or an opportunity to begin again.

With imaginative storytelling and witty, relatable prose, Bekah DiFelice offers wisdom for those struggling to belong in a world where home is constantly shifting. When our hope of home is rooted in an unchangeable God, we are not uprooted, lost, or made homeless by change. We become found ones on the move.

About this title

From the Back Cover

On the move . . . again? Wondering when you will “arrive”?
The impermanence of home tends to be one of life’s most recurring surprises. Is it possible to build a permanent sense of home in a rootless life? If home is where the heart is, what can we love that will quiet the restlessness within?

Take heart. You aren’t adrift after all. When our hope of home is rooted in an unchangeable God, we are not uprooted, lost, or made homeless by change. We become found ones on the move.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Almost There

Searching for Home in a Life on the Move

By Bekah DiFelice

NavPress

Copyright © 2017 Bekah DiFelice
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-63146-471-3

Contents

INTRODUCTION: Adrift, xiii, 
CHAPTER ONE: Gila Bend: On Leaving Home, 1, 
CHAPTER TWO: Empty Rooms: On Moving In, 17, 
CHAPTER THREE: When I Stopped Running: On Legacy and Identity, 27, 
CHAPTER FOUR: Steadfast: On Marriage, 43, 
CHAPTER FIVE: The Front Door: On Fear, 59, 
CHAPTER SIX: Making Room: On Homecoming, 75, 
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Rickety Table: On Building Community, 89, 
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Most Homesick Day: On Church, 103, 
CHAPTER NINE: Almost There: On Faith and Doubt, 117, 
CHAPTER TEN: Where Our Parents Left Off: On the Pull to Move Back, 131, 
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Outpost: On Hospitality, 139, 
CHAPTER TWELVE: Never a Native: On Life on the Move, 153, 
Acknowledgments, 167, 
Notes, 171, 

CHAPTER 1

GILA BEND

On Leaving Home

Home is where one starts from. T. S. ELIOT, "East Coker"

It was in the desert that I realized I was far from home.

I sat on the curb of a small-town gas station, listening to the buzz of a failing fluorescent lightbulb and the hiss of cars passing by. It was late. Close to midnight, I think. The desert sun had long descended into darkness, but it was still hot. One hundred and twelve degrees hot. And I'm going to be honest with you — the back sweat situation was widespread and alarming. I pulled my shirt away from my perspiring torso like gum from a shoe.

I was in Gila Bend, Arizona. "Home to 1,700 Friendly People and 5 Old Crabs," according to the whitewashed sign near the highway. Inside the convenience store was an array of souvenirs ranging from fermented rattlesnake and porcelain cacti to an entire aisle of creepy-crawly knickknacks that would thrill a nine-year-old boy. Hot dogs were two for a dollar and cigarettes were on sale and Mexico was only eighty miles away.

Our bright yellow moving truck was parked nearby, speckled with kamikaze bugs smeared across the windshield. I had followed my husband here, and that husband had followed the Marine Corps here, obeying his first set of military orders all the way to the outer fringes of Arizona, the sunbaked miles of almost-Mexico. He was being stationed in Yuma, Arizona, at a small air station ten miles from the border.

Do you know where Yuma is?

Yeah, I didn't either.

* * *

Our engagement was spent on the phone, as Mike trained in Quantico and I finished college in Colorado. When it came time to wait on military orders, Mike spoke confidently about the options. He said that San Diego was likely where we would be stationed — that's what he requested, after all — although Hawaii or Japan were possibilities as well. Since we had not yet lived under the discretion of the military, Mike and I mistakenly assumed that the military would cooperate with our best-laid plans, that perhaps it would consult our thoughts and feelings before making arbitrary decisions about our future, as though it were a waitress taking our order and offering helpful suggestions before ultimately giving us what we wanted.

For the record, the military is not at all like a waitress. It's more like a cafeteria lady — a domineering force with hair netting, bushy eyebrows, and heavily perspiring forehead — scowling at you from behind a cloudy sneeze guard. She puts on your tray whatever's available, whatever she likes, a menu predetermined in high-up, unseen places. And your job is to say thank you, to make the most of it. Your job is to keep moving.

But Mike and I didn't know this yet. We were just a couple of twenty-two-year-olds, idealistic and hungry for adventure. So in the waiting period of engagement, Mike and I discussed the luxury of living near an ocean, the possibility of learning how to surf, the prospect of living in Asia. I told my girlfriends about these exotic locations while twirling my engagement ring and awkwardly pronouncing the word fiancé.

Mike's orders came on a Friday afternoon in November. He had been in the field for the past two weeks mastering skills of land navigation, which basically meant he was learning how to use a compass while wearing camouflaged face paint as I waited for him to call. When he finally did, I was quick to answer.

"Hello?"

"Hi," he answered. "I got orders." His voice sounded quiet, calculated.

"What? Where?" I demanded.

"Arizona." The verdict sounded rehearsed, as if he had practiced it over and over again, rolling it around his tongue and speaking it aloud until the word drained itself of emotion.

Somehow I could sense the aftertaste of disappointment on his tongue, the discouragement he was trying to conceal. Somehow I knew that it was bad news he was trying to spin into good.

"Arizona." I repeated it aloud. First as a statement. Then as a question. My eyes darted side to side as I took a mental inventory of everything I knew about Arizona: Phoenix, golf courses, cacti, rattlesnakes, suntans, retirees, prescription deodorant.

"I can do Arizona," I said, more to convince myself than him. "Where in Arizona?"

Silence.

I heard him breathing, procrastinating.

One second.

Two seconds. Three. Four.

The silence sounded distinctly like dread.

"Where in Arizona?" I prompted.

He used to do this. He still does this. Mike takes an enormous amount of time to break big news. He is a careful decision maker, thoughtful and impossibly thorough. I'm certain that he organizes his thoughts before thinking them, aligning them squarely to one side and alphabetizing them when time allows. He reveals a decision slowly, feeding details one by one and waiting for me to chew, swallow, and digest before giving me more.

"MIKE. Where?" I yelled into the phone.

"Yuma," he whispered.

One word. No context. Mike delivered the news reluctantly, driving it like a flag into the space between us. We both stared at it in the distance as it waved frantic and final against a cloudless sky.

Yuma. For three years.

I opened my laptop and searched "Yuma, Arizona," frantically skimming the top results: Sunniest place on earth. Hottest city in America. Home of Yuma Territorial Prison.

Sun. Heat. Prison.

Sun. Heat. Prison.

SUN! HEAT! PRISON!

It was late fall in Colorado when I absorbed these words. The notion of Yuma arrived while I was wearing a sweater and wool socks, while I was sitting on a twin bed cloaked in flannel sheets and a down comforter. I owned nine jackets at the time and only one pair of flip-flops. The flip-flops were incidental leftovers from summer camp. I called them "shower shoes."

Colorado was home to me because it was where I grew up. The outdoorsy, casual persona had been nurtured into me, and I was proud of it. Mountains were my everyday companions, tall chaperones that waited outside all ordinary places: grocery stores and gas stations and suburban backyards. My lungs had a sense of athletic superiority because I grew up at high altitude. "Sea level" was a term you used to feel sorry for people who lived near natural disasters.

Yuma was at sea level. And when ranked alphabetically, it was basically last. Did that matter? I wondered.

Sun. Heat. Prison. I turned the words over and over.

"Wait," I said to Mike with growing panic, "you are moving me away from home. To the hottest place on earth. To live among criminals?" Silence.

"Do you realize that is the actual definition of hell?"

* * *

Mike and I dated for six years before we got engaged. We were high school sweethearts, so, you know, adorable. Yuma was our new task, our first joint assignment away from home. So I suppose I should have felt a swelling sense of destiny and purpose and excitement. But those feelings didn't come until later. They came slowly, over weeks and months. To this day, I don't really know how a person adapts to change. But I suspect that most of the time you just have to live into it, to take deep breaths and get out of bed in the morning and trust that interruption usually doubles as provision, even when you can't see the how or why yet.

When I look back at the time between that phone call and the day I moved away, I don't recall a moment of breakthrough or epiphany, a moment when I came to terms with the unexpectedness of Yuma as my temporary home. I do remember a lot of emotional eating and Google research on whether rattlesnake repellent was a thing. It's not, in case you're wondering, which is why I told Mike that I'd prefer to live on the second story of a secure fortress if we had to live in the desert. He laughed as if I were joking.

I was not.

Over and over again I told friends and family about our orders, saying no, Mike didn't request Yuma ... no, we didn't even know it was an option ... and yes, we were getting excited ... sort of. Passing days wore down the shock of the news until our excitement became meager, fragile, then eventually real. Arizona wasn't so far from Colorado. We heard that there was hiking and recreation on the Colorado River. "Outdoorsy people love it!" a non-outdoorsy person once told us. We heard, too, that a small town was a good place to build meaningful relationships, which was absolutely true. Perspective arrived for us day by day until the location became a small footnote on the bigger announcement: Mike and I were getting married. And we were moving to a place of our own.

At least in my experience, I've found that pressing into big change doesn't always translate into easy or instant enthusiasm. Even good surprises tend to knock the wind right out of you. They often feel more like an invasion, a redirection, a total inconvenience. Adapting to change is like tucking your knees in when somebody wants to squeeze by your seat, or hitting the brakes for a car to merge ahead of you when you're already in a hurry. Adapting to change is making room for something you didn't expect in space that's already crowded. For most of us, it is painful and annoying.

Resilience, then, is a trait that has to be stretched — or shocked — into us. It's the prize of those who have watched their placeholders of control crumble and have lived to see how there was, in fact, a future beyond the circumstance that they considered the end of the world. For all the ways Yuma was not at all what I wanted, it was in many ways exactly what I needed. Does that sound trite? Perhaps it is. But even though the move was not preceded by excitement, it was eventually followed by a deep sense of gratitude. And I think this is true of a lot of change. We can experience the vast potential of what's next only after we are forced to step away from what came before.

* * *

I'm not sure I would have ever left Colorado on my own. I would have talked about it and planned it and made excuses to stay while meaning to go. I would have grown swollen with potential but remained fixed to the comforts of home. I'm not sure I would have ever uprooted if I'd had to do it alone. I'm a tiny bit bold, but mostly I'm impulsive, reckless, and unbelievably bad at packing. This is why God linked me up with a responsible Marine, I think. Mike did not rescue me, but his companionship did make me braver and better in every way. And I loved him with such abandon that I would have followed him anywhere.

So I did.

Just after our honeymoon and the day before we moved, Mike and I decided to buy furniture since we owned exactly none. On a Saturday afternoon we pulled into a discount furniture store and purchased items I assumed all adults owned: a sectional sofa, coffee table, and dining set. The two of us reclined side by side on showroom sofas, sat in chairs that weren't ours, and shared opinions that we made up on the spot: "Of course I prefer microsuede!"

After an hour of canvassing the showroom floor, Mike pulled the yellow moving truck around the back of the store and asked the employees to load our newly purchased furniture next to our newly received wedding gifts. It was all so tidy, the boxes on boxes that were prelabeled and as geometrically compatible as a winning game of Tetris. It felt like an accomplishment, that truck that held our whole mobile life wrapped tight in plastic and potential.

Preparing to leave might be the most thrilling part. Still cushioned with the familiarity of home, you can change your name and register for an absentee ballot and purchase furniture for rooms that haven't felt resoundingly empty yet. There are a multitude of ways to say good-bye that require only an efficient execution of a checklist. And in the midst of change it's such a relief to have something to do, to have tasks that combat emotional pressure with endorphins of productivity. Before pulling out of the driveway, you can sprint through a dozen rites of passage in front of a cheering audience, fueled by excitement and home-cooked meals made by your mom.

The hard part for me was not the preparation. It was the actual leaving, the ducked head and enthusiastic wave down the backward descent of the driveway. It was saying good-bye without knowing if I would ever raise kids near my sister, if I would miss out on family milestones or holidays or lose touch with friends whom I considered lifelong. It was the fact that I had no idea what was coming. I had never been to Yuma, nor could I picture it at all. But I could see what I was leaving, what had been home most of my life. I knew Colorado. And it was in me, around me. So leaving it was a risk. It was giving up what I knew to gain what I didn't.

There's no guarantee that leaving and arriving are a fair trade. And this is nerve-racking, like painting a statement wall in the center of your living room or ordering beef lo mein at a restaurant without a safety rating. You have a hunch that this choice might improve or enhance your life, but in the end you're not totally sure how it's going to turn out. So you stand in your living room staring at the walls, or in the lobby of a restaurant looking at a menu with pixelated entrée photos, and in the end you decide whether or not you're the sort of person who's willing to risk, which is really another way of deciphering whether or not you're the sort of person willing to fail spectacularly.

At least for me, this is the hard part. Paint to wall. Fork to mouth. Car to road. The hard part is leaning into the risk and convincing yourself it's worth it. The hard part is finally, ultimately moving away from home. It is leaving. It is the uneasy silence that settles into the car after you merge onto the highway. Or if you can't bear the weight of silence, it is the song you turn on that will forever act as the soundtrack of this moment.

* * *

We left Colorado early in the morning, before the sun cracked light on the purple mountains. It seemed appropriate that this new endeavor coincided with the sunrise, like God was shining a flashlight pointing us west.

It takes fifteen hours to drive from Colorado Springs to Yuma, longer if you're following a rented moving truck that sways clumsily in the desert wind. My mom called every half hour while I squinted through the windshield and watched mountains give way to plains and plains succumb to desert. Soon the landscape was populated with plants sharpened slim as knives. Barbed wire grew out of cacti. The terrain was impossibly, insistently flat, a single plain that stretched for eternity.

When night set in, headlights flashed bright and aggressive from the opposite direction. So many people, it seemed, were fleeing from the very place I was headed. I departed Colorado armed with Cheez-Its and gusto, and in the desert I realized that both were gone. I started to feel a bit sad and homesick — mostly, I think, because I was tired, a symptom that tends to light up the rest of my emotional circuit board.

There was so much hope and optimism for the next chapter. Of course there was. But still it was quite sad to mourn the end of something, to realize that a part of you is shrinking in the rearview mirror, and that when you wake up in the morning, your life will look completely different.

Practically speaking, I know that leaving home has a lot of reasonable advantages. It matures everyday humans into respectable citizens by making them independent and self-reliant. It trains them in building community, forces them to manage time and money and refrigerator inventory well. Away from home, we realize that cable television is, in fact, quite expensive, and that bills come at the unfair pace of once a month. Living in an unfamiliar space frightens us into the habit of locking the front door behind us. It also thrills us with the liberty to stock a freezer with ice cream or to vacuum without pants on.

To leave home is also to make room in an important interior way. It removes your associations, your affiliations, the characteristics and comforts of homes that came before. It is terrifying and exciting to arrive at a place where no one knows you, where suddenly it doesn't matter if you got good grades in high school or used to be a few pounds lighter or had a season where you were, regrettably, brunette. Suddenly you are no longer defined by your history or decisions, nor by the people who spoke into your future with plans that didn't match your own. The moment of departure is the moment of reinvention, of renewal, of freedom. The moment you get a redo on the adjectives associated with your name.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Almost There by Bekah DiFelice. Copyright © 2017 Bekah DiFelice. Excerpted by permission of NavPress.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: NavPress Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 163146471X
• ISBN 13: 9781631464713
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192