Sexy Changing in the Staying

I fly to Florida for a family wedding tomorrow. It will be my first big trip since re-stabilizing in Asheville last month.

Beyond this upcoming flight, I don’t anticipate flying anywhere else until some time in 2020. A solid few months of flightlessness.

This used to be my normal, only boarding flights once or maybe twice a year. Since my “Year of Flights” in 2018, though, it’s not normal anymore.

With so much land yet to have been trod, I can’t not explore beyond my regional backyard.

Like, life is too short not to fly to Hawaii or Ireland or Puerto Rico or the nine other places to where I took flight last year. Or Montana or Maine, just two of the places I wandered this year.

I certainly want to scout out some more new terrain in 2020, continuing to reach for the impossible conquering of this globe.

But as for the rest of 2019 . . . I honestly don’t feel much of an itch to go anywhere. Crazy, right? I’ve actually enjoyed staying put in Asheville this month, getting my literal house in order as I get my metaphoric one together, too.

I’ve rejoined CrossFit, and my arms and shoulders and lower back ache constantly. I actually really love that perpetual sore feeling. Oh my masochistic self.

I’ve restarted counseling, and I’m processing childhood memories I’ve left long dormant. Seeing how they absolutely still affect me two decades later. I’m kicking up dust in all the necessary ways while bringing it back to who God says I was then — and am still.

I’ve reconnected with some old friends in the area and have even started making some new ones already. Had a “small world” encounter with one such person last night, and I’m just so grateful. Those “small world” intersections convince me of a God purposefully connecting our souls like dots in the newspaper fun & games section.

I’ve refilled my giant white board calendar with deadlines for blogs and podcasts and videos and other creative endeavors, both for YOB and my own “brand,” and it makes my organized self feel more on track than I’ve been in months.

It’s really hard to feel on track while on the road, the scenery always changing around me.

Along with my renewed productivity and health here, I appreciate the timing. Praise God I got back to the Blue Ridge just in time for autumn. You won’t find a prettier place in October — fight me (with a pen, not a sword).

Soon the leaves will be gone, and a brisk gray will fog the streets and hills. The seasons will change because it is God’s way, Donald Miller once said, and I want to keep changing, too.

Traveling changes a man, certainly. It’s what draws me to the road and the skies, again and again. The blaze of colors to my exterior and interior alike.

But staying put changes a man, too, I’m better realizing. It’s not as sexy. Not as readily apparent.

But sexy change indeed happens when you commit to a place, a church, an apartment, a people. A God. A sense of rootedness and confidence and peace and longevity and that dreaded h-word I often hesitate to invoke.

And so I change as I remain in this same but different Blue Ridge home, and 2019 dwindles away.

One burning decaying agonizing rebirthing leaf at a time.