travel log

11:11 MEM
"These Girls" -Ryan Adams

We never really grow up do we. At least I didn't. I just got taller. I find myself on a rainy day walking through the big halls of the MEM airport. My sippy cup is now my cup of Starbucks. Drinking my marble mocha through a straw. I'm tearing up cause i miss my momma and I just want to go home. I don't think I ever get used to goodbyes. Maybe my outward countenance gets better, but it never feels good to say goodbye to people you love. That age old saying, "home is where the heart is," is so true. Memphis is a hard płace. Though i romanticize about it, I still find that it's not necessarily this place but the memories of times with family and friends that make me call it home. Home, where will you be? Or better said--home, who will you be? As the rain drizzles on in Memphis and as I watch it through the big airport windows and wait for my flight to Chicago, I wonder about these things. I wish I could find my way home. I wish I were with you.

15:30 Chicago Ohare
I started thinking about how absurd Abraham's journey must've felt. I see him traveling with all this family, his herds and tents and trinkets. They stop for some water as they pass through a village in the middle of no where. Abraham meets some of the locals and they ask the obvious questions: Where you going? Why you going there? How long you been traveling? Do you know anyone where you're going? By this time, Abraham has had plenty of time to rethink and reconstruct that conversation with God in which he heard God tell him to leave everything and to head for a better place. And Abraham's looked at it from all angles and asked himself all these questions before. So he startes to answer the guy's questions. He says, "We're going to a better place." The guy asks, "Where's that exactly?"
--"I'm not really sure. I'm just heading where God leads me."
--"You're following God... huh. Interesting. So what does this better place look like? What makes it better?"
--"Umm... I'm not really sure what it looks like. I've never been there. I'm not really sure what makes it better because I've never seen or heard of it and I'm not entirely certain where exactly it is. All I know is that God said it was better."
--"You have family there? or a new job offer?"
--"Nope."
--"How do you know it's a better place if you've never been there?"
--"Uh... well I'm not sure. God just told me it was."
--"Well what was wrong with the place you're moving from? Why was it bad?"
--"No it wasn't a bad place. I grew up there and my ancestors too. You know. Every place has it's good and bad things about it. Like the water is too hard or soft or the summers just last forever and I feel like I beached whale. But it wasn't like a horrible place. It was a good place. I could've lived there for the rest of my life and died there and been happy."
--"If it wasn't a bad place and you could've and were happy there, then why worry about this better place that you've never seen before and don't even know why it's better?"

By this time, Abraham's frustrated because he knows this circular conversation because he's had it in his mind with himself everyday since he left his family's land. He doesn't have any better answers. Some days he realizes that he hasn't really had any more confirmation of this move since that one conversation with God. And the conversation is getting blurry in his mind anyways with all the sand. It's been one hill after another and there's no end to it in his mind. Really all reasoning says he's being ridiculous and just unsatisfied and ungrateful for what he had. He's tired. His family is worn out. They're ready to have some consistency in their lives. Change is draining and gets really old really fast. He had been happy for the most part. It wasn't a bad place or a bad life. There was good in it. But there's that small reminder of the conversation of God where he felt his heart pounding in the humbling moment when God promised him descendents like the unending blanket of stars in the sky. Life before wasn't bad, but he'd been promised something better. A better place. A better way. He'd heard God and knew he was real. There was no doubting that fact and no second guessing it. Where exactly God was on this long journey... well somedays he was near but most he seemed so far away. But he kept moving toward that better place.

He died never seeing that Better Place and the things that had been promised to him. But he was commended for his faith. And God is still living by that promise. Claiming descendents to himself as many as the stars in the sky. Calling his descendents of faith to that Better Place.

And we walk The Better Way in faith of the existence of The Better Place.