For A While

I’ve moved six times in the last four and a half years. As I paused for one last look on the way out of my previous place, these parting words came to mind: thanks for holding my heart for a while.

From house to house and friend to friend, my heart has traded hands and homes often. I’ve perceived this constant uprooting as an unwanted theft of safety and rest, frustrated and frazzled by the endless building and unraveling of stability. With each shift, weariness grew, as did the depleting acceptance that the only tradition would be change – a hard pill to swallow for a heart desiring the richness of longevity.

Inconsiderate of such desires, change continued.

Patterns create habits that carry out well beyond the patterns’ ends. Move enough times and you may stop caring for things as if they’ll last so that by the time permanence arrives, all you have to offer are habits of survival.

Leaving has always felt like loss when occurring outside of my imagined design. Loss, in all of its layers of heaviness and grief, has taken its toll on my tendencies, shaping my mind and my habits to defend what it cannot.

Yet more recently, when I flip through the pages of the stories each hand and home have written, I find this sense of loss evolving into gratitude.

I see the stories that got me here and are taking me to where I do not yet know to go; I see the developing plotlines and unprecedented characters; and I see the abrupt endings, loitering mid-sentence, parched for resolution. I remember the way these endings once tormented me. I remember the questions of “why,” the wonderings of “if,” and the wanderings of “maybe.” I remember every answer I created that never quite fit and the restlessness of waiting for the denouement.

I am overcome by gentle relief as I take the empty spaces that once afflicted my heart with loneliness and confusion and instead pencil in: “thanks for holding my heart for a while,” chapter after chapter until I have finally arrived, in full, to the present.

By coming to terms with “for a while ” I recognize how favored I’ve been. For throughout this life my heart has always found a home. Temporary, yes, but a home even still. Keeping things close to your heart won’t guarantee they stay close to you, but goodness is not always measured by longevity. There are some things that can cause you to be sick should you keep and consume them outside of their proper timing.

There is, however, one who abides beyond the temporary; who knows the timing and provides its bread, day by day, chapter by chapter, house by house, friend by friend. I’ve always imagined His promise to make “everything beautiful in its time” as something to come; an eventually my heart must hope and pray for in order to see happen. I wonder now if those things do not need time to become anything different, but rather time gave me the gift of seeing them as they are and have always been – beautiful, right then, in their moment.

One chapter, then the next. Thanks for holding my heart for a while.