I
We were in the park, smoking cigars.
He was talking to me about her. She was beautiful. (And she was; she was stunning.) He was talking about loving her, marrying her. Someday. Someday slanted though, tilted close, someday could be next month. Would they elope? I took a drag. My second cigar in my life. Bitter. I liked it because I loved him. That’s how these things go, I think.
He was my best friend.
(I emphasize the past tense.This was the moment when it broke. This is the moment when after a year of doing ministry together, a year of him with guitar and me with Word, a year of loving people, a year of thinking we were called to something, it hairline fractured. Just enough.)
He told me that he might maybe just sort of could be sleeping with her.
And might maybe just sort of could be it didn’t matter that he was.
They were in love. That made it alright.
(With God? With me? I was uncertain.)
They were in love. That meant he could keep doing the ministry thing.
I vomited.
In the bushes, saying it was just because we had worked out before, that I hadn’t eaten that day, that I inhaled the smoke of the cigar instead of holding it in my mouth. I made a rosary of my lies as I hid the reason, the overwhelming feeling that my world was tearing, that I didn’t know what to do or say.
I’ve never had a cigar since. I think that says something, at least.
II
“Where are you?”
My professor calls me when I’m at the turn on the highway that points me home. I’m an hour from campus. I inform her of this. It’s Thanksgiving break. I’m skipping my last class. Not her’s, someone else.
“I can’t do it.” I am clipped in response. She already knows that I can’t do. She knows that I have been his roommate for the past four months, how after the announcement in the park, everything else broke too. She knows that I had tried, poorly, to keep things loving, how he had stopped going to church altogether, how he hated me when I said I was considering attending the Episcopal church–You like all that stand up, cross yourself bullshit?–he asked me that once, in the Mexican diner off the corner of the church with the billboard that said Jesus had a fishing story too.
(An aside, a few decades ago, my mother was the senior adult coordinator and leader for that church. It was before they had a sign that talked about Jesus and fishing stories. Strange how our worlds circle back on us.)
“Come back. Go to class.” She was insistent. I said nothing. “You have to come back,” she pushed. “You have to come back, because there will come a point in your life when it won’t be packing your car and leaving campus. You’ll be looking up flights to Paris, packing bags, and running from your life. You have to stop fleeing to Paris.”
I pulled over. I sat in silence for a few minutes. I turned my car around, headed back. She made me Moroccan for lunch. Well, in her way. She microwaved a frozen dinner and handed me a banana. It was, in its ordinariness, one of the most formative moments of my life.
III
The first summer I moved to England, it was to escape. I told everyone that it was to do mission work with a church, but it was to escape. It was, by proxy, my ticket to Paris. It was the fleeing from the former best friend, the park, the might maybe just sort of could be.
Tread lightly in those spaces, I learned, because the healing was quiet work and came when I didn’t know what was coming. Came like spark.
IV
The second summer I went to England, it was to discern. I had healed from the former best friend, the park, but I had healed in the sort of cauterized way. The blood stopped spilling, but the stub left behind was an ugly thing. The stub was wound I was not ready for Christ to heal.
(It was my justification. I know that, now, but I did not know it then.)
Again, I fled to Paris. Literally this time. I boarded a Eurostar the day after arriving in London and I fled to Paris.
I was standing on a platform waiting for a train at Gare du Nord, the Parisian central line, when something caught in the wind, Holy Ghost like ice, and somehow I was snapped to myself, to see clearly what was before me: I want it all to be black and white.
For all my talk of grace. Of greys.
I want the distinctions.
I want you to be hero in my fairy tale. Or the villain. I want you to choose a side and always, ever, be that way. It’s why I think it sensible to flee to Paris when trouble brews, because I believe that with one motion the lot has been decided. (Not everyday, I don’t think, this naive perspective only creeps in on the tired day, the blue nights, in the midst of the deep hurts.)
I don’t want you to be grey.
It’s too hard. It’s too complicated. It’s too beautiful and too terrible.
You flee to Paris.
An expensive metaphor, but it is the metaphor I seem to live by.
I push out an orphan prayer that I am unsure reaches up to God: How to grace?
A poor prayer. Fragment prayer. Child prayer. But essential: I ask the means. I ask an infinitive, an ongoing, immediate verb.
How to grace?
V
Today, I move to Scotland. I’m taking a redeye out of Houston. I’ll wake in London. Connect.
(I am a fleer. I repeat this to myself, another sort of rosary. What am I doing? I’ve been rambling about this for weeks now and people have misunderstood. They think I’m afraid to go. They think I don’t know how to restart. What has not come across, what I have not admitted directly, is I know how to go too well. I know how to flee too well.)
I have packed my life into three large suitcases. I have healed, in the packing, the former best friend, the park. Healed. (He has healed. I forget that too often.) I have laughed a bit and smiled old. I have placed the essentials of being into a small portion and willed, prayed, vagabond prayer to the vault of heaven, that when I get on that plane I don’t lose myself to the grief of leaving those loved.
How to grace?
It still rattles ’round my heart.
I still see too black and white–again, for all this talk of grey. Such talk. Would that talk could be prayer. (I think it can be. Some days, this is the only thing that keeps me afloat.)
Today, I move to Scotland. And I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave the ones I love. I don’t want to uproot. I don’t want to flee. Not this time. Not yet.
Go and I shall show you.
Whispered against my ear once, I believe He repeated it to heart, to being.
(I shall go to Paris in the spring, as it happens. A vague aside, but worth saying. I am still going.)
But might maybe just sort of could be this is fleeing?
But.
How to grace?
No. I think this is about fleeing to Him. I think this is about learning trust. I think this is about orphan prayers finally reaching the throne of God.
And that’s how to grace.
See you on the other side of the ocean.
And I wonder, you, friend, if you flee to Paris too?
This is floating down into the recesses of my soul. The gray is frightening me just now. Do you get lost in it if you don’t make a break for Paris?
Safe travels.
I do get lost sometimes and, yes, it means I need to make the break for Paris. What is hard to discern, what I pray to discern–this is the strange bit of faith, isn’t it?, praying about praying–is when I am fleeing because I like to flee or fleeing because for the sake of my soul, my sanity, my cleaving to Christ, it’s time to go. It’s not a distinction I make easily, or can codify, but there is a feeling to it, a kind of quickening of will and spirit, and sudden, peaceful awareness of rightness, of calm.
Yes…too often.
This piece makes clear to me that “to grace” is to hang in that gray in-between place, arms spread to breaking and just receive His gilded ornaments of melted love. This is such beauty, Preston. Your honesty startles.
Holly, you are such a writer. Life, this. Life given.
“You flee to Paris.An expensive metaphor, but it is the metaphor I seem to live by.” Love this.
Flee to God: that’s how to grace. Yes, friend, amen.
May He bless your Houston, bless your London, bless your Scotland, bless your Paris. May each stop journey you closer to grace, closer to God.
How is it I’ll miss you when you’ll be no virtually farther than you’ve always been? But I will. I will. And I’ll remember this beautiful reminder of how to grace in the missing.
All love to you, Preston, friend.
Oh, and I you. Geography is a silly thing, yes. All love to you.
What I read here, what strikes me most about your flight, is the grace you’re flying into, the grace you need for your black-and-white self. Even when we think we’re running away, God knows why and what we’re running into. Most of the time, we’re running toward the thing we desire, the real, the innocence we feel we’ve lost, the dream of something more or better, the hope for rest. Even when we don’t run, we chase these things, because they are the way into Him, the cry of our heart that is only answered by God Himself, the desire that must ever and only be sated when we see Him face to face.
You have as much grace from Him as your friend has, a friend you still love deeply, no matter his choices, no matter the break that happened in your relationship. The more you know the grace, the more you’ll feel it again, the more you’ll know how you’ve received it and how God gives enough for all of us because He KNOWS we’re gonna blow it when we think we shouldn’t.
I am excited for you, for this change in your world. God made some of us to grow where we are, bloom where we are planted, and He made others of us for change that would help us see Him differently. I suspect you are the latter. Live that without shame. He’s given you a wonderful gift.
“I want you to be hero in my fairy tale. Or the villain. I want you to choose a side and always, ever, be that way.”
This is my mentality as well.I am so frustrated by the inconsistency of others. And then I wonder — isn’t God frustrated by MY inconsistency?
If just seems that life would be so much easier — clearer — if people chose a side and stuck with it.
My father — the minister — who has helped so many, while abandoning me in my greatest need? What do I do with that? Is he good or bad?
Thanks for this. Grace/grays. I needed this.
“What do I do with that?”
Is it enough for me to say, “I hear you. Yes. I hear you. I know. Come sit beside and we’ll have coffee and pie.”
I am old enough to be your mother, and still I remember my first encounter with the gray. Oh, the heartbreak! I love your blog, your writing is beautiful. And I too, having grown up in a non-liturgical church, love liturgy. I think it meets a deep human need. Wishing you the best.
Almost exactly 7 years ago I was doing my own fleeing to Paris–incidentally, it was in the form of getting on a plane to Scotland to spend a semester in Edinburgh–and I didn’t stop running, all over the world and the country, until pretty recently.
It’s so funny, though, because in some of those moments it’s like the Lord meeting Elijah on Sinai and asking him, “What are you doing here?” Even in the moments of our trying to escape the grey, He shows up, quietly whispering to us, and calling us back to our calling; He feeds us the bread of Himself.
I’m looking into leaving again, this time from Houston, but it’s in pursuit of an voice that’s been singing in my soul for years now. He’ll be there when I get there, and He’ll be there on the way. And the same is true for you, brother. Go in peace. He keeps you.
“He feeds us the bread of Himself.”
Again and again. Amen. Yes.
Like this piece. You have a way with words, man.
There can be such growth in the fleeing. It is a journey, this life, this fleeing.
blessings to you in Scotland.
Such beauty in your words, Preston. You paint rich pictures and I am left haunted by them. Are you fleeing from, this time around? No. I sense such good things ahead for you and somehow feel your time in Scotland will change and grow you in ways you can’t fathom right now. Sometimes uprooting ourselves for a season gives us new eyes to see ourselves and to see God at work. And He is at work, Preston. Even when you preferred the black and white to gray. Thanks be to God, He was working even then. I think back to when I first thought of moving to Nashville- or really the second time I considered moving. I kept wondering: am I trying to escape? Because our problems do follow us wherever we land. In the end, I knew Nashville wasn’t an escape but a leap into the unknown. I could speak for hours of the ways God has used this place to strengthen and grow me. I am now more myself, more who He envisioned me to be. Not necessarily because of Nashville itself but because I dared to go. So yes, Preston. Flee to Paris and see what comes of it. He will use your act of daring.
People disappoint us, all the time. And we disappoint others – and ourselves, too. But you know what? There is so much to learn in the middle of all that disappointing. You’re learning it, Preston. And packing those three suitcases onto that trans-Atlantic flight is another step in that lifelong process. Keep opening yourself to the disappointments. You may just be amazed at what blessing you’ll find there – yes, even there. There are only a couple of truly black-and-white things in this life we live – the inevitability of our own brokenness and the reliability of grace, just in the nick of time. You already know this – and you will ‘know’ it more and more, layer after layer, as you move through the years ahead. You start a new chapter in the morning. Embrace it. And keep us posted from time to time, okay?
There are a few people in this life, Diana, that I shall consider myself to have lived well if I can, someday, brush against the vault of the wisdom and grace they carry with them. You are one of them. Thank you, time and again and a half, for the words you’ve littered across my own journey.
This is so lovely and heartbreaking and I know, I know how this feels. My fleeing has been to Oxford, to Boston, back to Texas when things get hard. It’s so much easier to flee than to do the hard work of staying, of living, of being here now.
Blessings on you as you go – not fleeing this time, I hope, but moving toward something wonderful.
this is beautifully personal. thank you for sharing the truth of this and the gathered pain and wisdom that took years to write this one piece.
I am afraid to flee myself out of a misappropriated obligations (but that’s another story) so I do the opposite – I fill up my life with the cacophony of more obligations to other things and people and events so I avoid the silence and hurts by never being alone.
In a strange way I envy your bravery (or cowardice as you may think). but the most beautiful part is your perspective now of fleeing to Him. that grace, His grace, is always and only our best refuge – no matter where we are in the wide world.
I have a perennial fear of being abandoned. I think, in this sense, I understand you quite well.
“For all my talk of grace. Of greys.”
Love it.
Just over two weeks ago, I boarded a plane (my first) to Ghana, Africa where I’ve planned to spend eight months teaching in a kindergarten classroom and supervising interns who run a women’s literacy program here. I didn’t want to come. I felt like I was called here; but I didn’t want to give up my life back home. I had finally reached a point in my life where I was content and joyful even amidst pain and sorrow.
But I uprooted myself, boarded the plane, and these past two weeks have been hard. You wrote that you prayed that God would prevent you from losing yourself in the grief of leaving those loved, and I am there, right now, drowning. And I just want to flee, back home, to where life is safe, comfortable, familiar.
But you words have encouraged me … that He’ll find me even in my desire to flee. That His grace is ever present, even in a world that seems so unfamiliar. Thank you for that reminder today.
I move to Paris in 2 weeks…but I’d quite like to stay in England! However I am hoping God will draw me back to Him there- to a church community where I can find Him again.
This is one of the hardest stories I’ve read in a long while–hard and true. Just like grace. Thanks for writing this. I’ve been struggling with a good many things just in terms of running away and ‘grey areas’ and what black and white is, and this is a bit of a Godsend.
I often flee, but I don’t get far. To the bathroom or the kitchen, usually, and the three sets of feet always find me. I dream sometimes of fleeing for real – to Paris would be lovely. But I know that my radical act of doing grace is staying and staring these little faces in the eye and letting them see all the imperfect in me. It is probably the most frightening and wonderful thing I have ever done, and each day it takes my breath for both reasons.
Thank you for sharing so intimately. Your writing is just beautiful. Looking forward to more from Scotland.
For all my talk of grace. Of greys. You flee to Paris.
Quite simply, this is my life. My every moments are filled sharing the blessings of grace. And the how can it be of grace. Yet grey seems to be the true color of it all. After eighteen years of marriage, children thirteen and eleven years old, at heart I am still one with a longing to flee. To find that something. I stay for love. Returning the love so graciously poured unto me by my Lord through my husband. To show grace upon my daughters that they may know black and white in their home. And not flee the grey. I pray earnestly of a reprieve this desire for Paris. I know the language there, it is not so different as where I stand now. God bless. “The Lord replied, my presence will go with you and I will give you rest. “