On the Eve of a New Thing

Reflections from a Kansas hotel just before lift off

Happy (almost) new year! I found a moment to hastily gather some thoughts before our big move overseas. Here they are.

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Not every new year’s crossing feels bold and exciting. Many of my yearly starts have felt quiet and contemplative, or even wearisome and disappointing. Seven years ago, I remember lagging myself across the year’s end in complete survival mode, hardly able to discern one day from the next, caught in the swell of late-night feedings, middle-of-the-night cries, and early-morning diaper changes. “The only goal I have this year is to potty train a toddler,” I texted some friends that January, having lost my sense of dreaming inside the fog of caretaking.

Two years later, still fumbling my way through early motherhood and wrestling some nagging vocational questions, I dared to ask for the only Christmas gift I truly wanted: space. Brad agreed, so for one day before the new year, I tucked myself away inside a Wichita hotel room by the airport and spent an entire day thinking and praying, eating take-out, and filling endless pages in my journal. I made some intentions for the new year, but I did so less like a confident woman ready to take on the world, and more like a girl feeling her way towards something she didn’t know if she could find, but who wasn’t ready to give up, yet.

As I lay on the hotel bed that day, airplanes flew over me in a steady stream, preparing to land. I watched their bellies from the ground, wondering where they had been and where they might be going. In those years, I felt grounded—firmly planted at the epicenter of an orbit revolving around daily needs and daily work. But sometimes, in my quiet moments, I sensed the fluttering of wings, the spark of a sky suddenly lighting up before dark. I had recently started going to therapy, and I had also started writing more—not as an academic, but as a woman with a story and a soul—and although I didn’t know it yet, the path of something new was already forming beneath my feet.

Now, four years since that day, I find myself in another Wichita hotel room next to the airport. This time, I am surrounded by a scattering of lived-in suitcases (16 bags in all), take-out remains, and a massive file of important paperwork, which I have been diligently carrying into every restaurant and public place as though my life depended on it (in a way, it does). The moving journey until this point has involved all of the work and sweat you might imagine, and the party is only getting started. At least forty-seven times each day, I wonder what on earth we have gotten ourselves into, and I often recall words from Andrew Peterson: “Ideas are a breeze. Incarnating them is more like a hurricane.” 

The demarcation between 2022 and 2023 feels as stark and hurricane-like to me as a new year has ever been. In two days, I will step onto a plane and let it carry me into the sky—beyond the flying geese, beyond my beloved Kansas sky, to a place I have never even seen. I’m confident the process will be less romantic than I have described here; I’m expecting it to involve pre-packaged airline food, dragging overtired children through customs, and trying to communicate in a language I don’t know.

Then again, who can say what will happen? Those are tales for the new year.

For now, I hover at the end of 2022, a year-end littered with goodbyes and tears, but also with bucketfuls of words and encouragement from our friends and family. The leaving process has been painful, but it has also pulled back the curtain on how deeply surrounded and loved we are. And in that way, it has been a gift.

I am trying to receive that gift in all of its nuance, holding it in my arms as closely and diligently as my overstuffed file of paperwork, while watching for the hidden goodness ahead inside this unknown transition. Somehow, I believe the gifts will keep showing up in surprising ways, day by simple day, just like they have in all the years before this one.

Eyes to the skies.

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash