Seasons...perhaps we anticipate a season of travel without quite realizing we are doing so...

This is a blog post, not a Facebook update. I realized it three sentences in. I don't always catch it.

I always said that Tuscaloosa was a nice place to live so long as you didn't have to stay here all the time. My family used to go away for whole summers at a time, and Daddy always took his sabbatical year in another place. I've been in Tuscaloosa far too long.

It's been what? Twenty years since I lived anywhere else? I had no idea it had been so long. I've never taken the time to tote it up before. The rest of the family spent a year in New York while I was in college, New York which is beautiful when the snow falls, but can also be bleak when the leaves are off the trees. They were at West Point. I visited them twice.

Since then it has been nothing but Tuscaloosa all the time, except for the occasional week-long excursion. A family took me with them to Gatlinburg once. Daddy took me with him to Mexico City on a trip with the Evangelicals to the Universidad there. We drove as a family cross-country to attend a campus ministry training seminar in Colorado once. We've been to Alabama's beaches more than once, and my husband's family lives in Huntsville.

But now I'm getting the traveling bug. He (my husband) prefers not to travel merely for the sake of traveling, but I begin to think we need the experience now of being forced to interact with unfamiliar people, unfamiliar cultures even within our own citizenship, though I lack the skill. I feel we need to scope out this country we live in, trying on new geography until we find the place that fits. But I'm not sure how we'd do it, and we'd miss our beds back home.

And with the University here, of course, the world comes to us.

But I hope perhaps this is a preparing. Maybe we are to be called away soon, and this longing to move (move freely, I mean, not necessarily in terms of a moving van-type move) comes on full-force so that we will be ready to answer the call. Maybe. Maybe we were tied here before in ways I could not perceive, but maybe change is coming and God is protecting me, preparing me for change. Maybe. Sometimes I think speculation is vain, and other times I think the speculation is the Holy Spirit sending messages to God's children. I couldn't tell you which this one is. It's certainly hard to distinguish between the two.

All I know is that all of this, this discomfort, this emerging need, must be building trust and faith. I think these past two years must be important, as hard as they've been, though others may say, "Aw, you've had it easy." Though sometimes I accuse God of torturing me, I also know anything He does is good, and for our good because He is Good.

This is where I metaphorically stand, watching the bamboo of my yard sway in the breeze.

I wonder if Christmas is about newness in a different way than the New Year is about newness, or Spring is about newness. I wonder.