Uh oh. I’ve only got 9% battery left and left my charger at home. I’ve also already dimmed my screen to an almost indiscernible level. Am I even typing on my draft screen right now? Is this Google? Amazon? One of a host of other sites I’d be far too embarrassed to disclose?
The seasons have changed here in Asheville, as evidenced by the faintly reddening trees across the parking lot, along with my flannel and runny nose. (Am I cold or is my GPA flaring up again?)
Every time this happens — time, happening — I return to Donald Miller and his old familiar words from Through Painted Deserts. Words that first changed my life a decade ago, and again and again in the decade since:
I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God’s way … I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.
The irony of all ironies is that I, Thomas Mark Zuniga, of all the wanderers wandering, do not want to leave right now. Do not feel inclined to change my location any time soon.
No, what I do want to change, what I want to “leave” is something more metaphoric than literal. More lifelong than seasonal.
I want to leave my usual ways of changing, leaving. Of always running from things, even if I’m also running to new ones. Of masking my loneliness and shame with adventures and Instagram posts.
I want to continue learning to stay for a change, staying for change. I want to enter the silence. Want to sit in the silence. Want to bore my way through it like a tunnel through a mountain or a drill through the block.
Yes, I still want the adventures and the epic Instagram posts. But I also want the growth. The maturity. The morning’s deep exhales after many cold tremors through the long dark night.
I want to be a healthier Tom with every changing of the seasons. Healthier all over, inside out.
God only knows what’s happening to me physically right now. But my physical health aside —
There’e the emotional health. The relational health. The spiritual health. It’s all ripe for the growing. Or the harvesting. Whatever autumnal metaphor best fits here.
I’m knee-deep into a 75-day fitness challenge to break me from my summer-long physical lethargy, and dare I say it’s helping me break all other lethargies of the soul and spirit.
It was my worst-ever summer, certainly, and there’s no changing seasons past. But hallelujah we have the present.
We have this breath.
We have today.
We have this season. The fall. The greatest of all the seasons. And don’t challenge me on that. I’m down to 2% battery now.
We must change like the trees with this whispering chill in the air. This scream growing louder and louder within us.
We could pack up our Galants and change our scenery, leaving like wide-eyed twenty-somethings setting sail for new chapters on new coastlines. We could do that (and have), yes.
And we can also change, leave in ways not yet seen, not yet discovered. Ways soon to be birthed in this coming explosion of colors.
