When the Dust Settles

My entire adult life has been a series of changes and moves. I taught for about ten years, but never staying more than two years in one school. My housing changed at an even more frequent rate. If you count college I have lived in 17 places in the past 20 years. The number of times I have moved however is greater since I lived with my Dad and my sister in the same location several times before or after a transition or move.

Most people would get tired just by thinking about that uprooted lifestyle. There are advantages to it though. Everything is always new and therefore exciting. When you are changing that often you are constantly learning, which I love. Nothing gets routine or boring. To top it all off, you rarely have to dust.

For the first time in my life, I now find myself in one place for more than two years. And there is no plan to change this in the near future, or even the distant future that I see.

There is a wonderful sense of stability and rootedness that I am very unfamiliar with. I love knowing that I do not have to leave my friends and the congregation and the town that I have come to love so much. I love watching the children of First grow up before my eyes. I get excited when I think about the children who will be in confirmation with me in a few years. I get to plan what I want to do differently next Advent and next Christmas. I get to help vision with a group AND know that I will be here to see the visioning begin to take shape into reality. The house I live in can be completely decorated. I can paint the walls! I can even buy furniture that I want to keep longer than a year. It is all lovely and fun and new in a way. I love so much of my new reality.

I do not, however, love the dusting.

You see that is the problem with roots and stability. They come with dust. They come with monotony and ruts and routines that allow dust to settle and gather. It seems to happen overnight too. One day the house was as cluttered, messy, and scattered as my house always is (and yes always will be!). The next day there were dust bunnies growing on shelves and cobwebs dancing in the morning light.

At any other time in my life, I would have ignored it for another week or month and just dusted things as I packed them.

But I have no plans to pack anything for years, which meant that before the Christmas party I had for the congregation I had to break down. I had to dust. Ugh. And I will have to keep dusting. I suppose it is a part of stability and structure. Oh how I long for my unstable and transitional life when I hold the dustcloth!

In the past month I have learned that it is not just furniture and nick-nacks that need to be dusted either. It is often relationships too.

I have been so used to saying good-bye soon after getting to know people, that I have forgotten what a long-term relationship is like. Sure I have stayed friends with people over the years, but texts, emails, skype, and visits help you keep the newness of everything. You never seem to get tired of people. More importantly, people have less time to get tired of, or annoyed with, me.

I have had an uncomfortable lesson recently. Like the furniture and nick-nacks, the relationships that I have cultivated need to be picked up, wiped off, examined for problems, and maybe even moved to a new location. The behavior that helped lead two people into a friendship, can often become cloying and sticky creating dust bunnies that need to be brushed away. Like a house, relationships can become worn with time and constant use. They need to be brightened up, repaired, given a fresh coat of paint and treated in a new way to maintain their shine. When a room in the house becomes stagnant to me, I re-arrange it. Why wouldn’t the relationships I have here also need to be arranged differently from time to time?

I have become rooted, and I love it. I do not however want to become rutted. I do not want my life to become monotonous. More importantly I do not that for the relationships in my life. Distance, change, and new surroundings are no longer my ‘get-out-free clause’. I need to learn to maintain a place and a life for a long period of time, because this time I will still be here when the dust settles.