It Is What It Was

There’s no easy way to come home to our real home, is there? We’ll do it, anyway (at least, whatever home that may be).

Every time we pull up to that place – be it our childhood home (should you be so blessed) or some other cherished place from our youth (perhaps a school or hang out, or just your special space you once retreated to and hopefully still do)… as inanimate, lifeless, empty as it may seem, it still has power over us.

It calls up feelings from within us and rarely can we resist.

When home is a place you can’t often visit, arriving is often stirred with greater warmth, delight, even peace. Yet other times, there’s this needed weight of feeling, a sense of emotional connection to home. That connection is often painted with the colors of wistfulness and nostagia, sadness and even regret.

Even more, the right song at the wrong moment can come into this painting and just wreck you hard. This collision of melacholy and yearning. Wanting things to be as they once were, wanting to somehow go back and look around. Maybe even wanting to bring your kids along so they can feel it too, see what it was like, and laugh with you. And maybe even cry with you.

It hurts.
Oh, it really, really does. I admit it. At least it’s a good kind of hurt.

Today I was visiting with former backyard neighbors and friend – a brother and sister, really, who I hadn’t seen or talked to in maybe 30 years. They and younger brother (my longest lifetime friend, Pat, who still lives in the area) came to visit my brother, sister, mom and me in our childhood home. Among the many things we talked about was this kind of hurt – the good hurts.

As we reminisced and laughed a lot, we would at times pause and think about the people in and around our lives so long ago. So many were good people, good to us. I could hear in Danny’s words the goodness of things he’s done as a man that he inherited in his youth from neighbors. I could hear in Maureen’s memories the steadiness of her optimism and the confidence of her hope that has guided her through seasons of delight and storms of dread. And in Pat, I could hear the echoes of a lifelong bond that reliably ebbs and flows like the tides: You just know it’ll be there.

Whatever we’ve felt today, we did so together. We confronted the realities of who we are and who we were. Who we aren’t anymore, what has gone and can no longer be. What the past has become – not just a collection of yesterdays and all the realized dreams… but the story of what we celebrated, what we endured, we we’ve moved beyond… and what we choose to be. Because of it. Despite it.

It is what it was.
And it was what it needed to be.
We can’t make it any better; so we just have to look and leave it be.

And so to reconnect with the past, be it in a place called home or a people called family – even families fused together beyond the barriers of bloodlines. As if speaking it back into existence, we’re able to look at share experiences like a mirror, reflecting something back to us. What we choose to see is perhaps best perceived in our feelings. Sure, the stories have their place, and the wisdom from them has its influence.

But they way we feel when we go there is special.
We need to feel our past. Even if it hurts.

It was what it is.
And it is what it’s got to be.
We can’t make it last forever; so we let it lose its hold and let us be.

This evening, Josiah and I rode around Plymouth, stopped for ice cream, and meandered through backstreets to take in the lovely architecture of homes old and new. With windows down and the lingering Michigan twilight spilling well past 9PM, the pensive mood of a new song by Journey only amplified the feelings of this day. I guess that sorta wrecked me. I guess maybe I needed it to.

So, yeah. It hurts.
Oh, it really does.
I won’t ever deny it.

At least it’s a good kind of hurt.
Still, it just hurts.

Thank God we get to hurt together, to hurt with each other.
And, because of that, let it call up healing from among us.

It is what is was. It was what it is. Yet we are who we’ve got to be, just as we were who we were meant to be.

And become more than we ever imagined possible.

Until forever, just got to take a hold of what is yet to be…