Update on Oregon.

"I felt compelled by this school as I was looking through it, and yes I know mostly everything can look good on the internet but it was a weird feeling. I have no idea what this means.
I haven't been feeling that great about Greenville lately and I'm not so sure why.

I even called my Mom to talk about the possibility of transferring. She told me to just keep praying about it. Don't worry no rash decisions will be made. This was just something that has been coming up and I don't know what I'll do about that yet. Who knows maybe I'll stay at Greenville next year, or maybe I'll go to Oregon.
It would be hard for me to go Oregon, but for some reason I'm not ruling it out yet. The months to come will be full of deliberation. "

-I posted that in January and the only thing that has changed is that it has become real. It's become a possible decision in my life.

I can't get past this. I thought for a while that I was just being unrealistic in thinking that I could go, pay more for college, and work it out. No. I wasn't be unrealistic, I was being doubtful. I was putting God into this box thinking that He couldn't do this. That He wouldn't ask me to leave my friends and my family for basically an entire school year. August through late December- Oregon. Early January through May- Uganda.
The thing is, He isn't asking me to leave them, because I'll still have them. He's only responding to the fact that I made a conscious decision to drop my nets and follow Him. I told Him that I would follow to the ends of the Earth. Well, here it is.
More than that though, this is something I WANT to do. I want to pack up and get out of here. I want to start in a new place. I find that intriguing. The only down fall is, I won't be here with all of the great people I call friends.

I just want to share the Author's Note from Donald Miller's book Through Painted Deserts. It's a book about his journey in a hippie van with his friend Paul from Houston, TX to Portland, OR. For the record, I keep this book with me at all times, it's my favorite book (I've read it probably 10 times) and I've never felt more excited/happy/compelled with this book until I learned the possibility of actually leaving.

IT IS FALL HERE NOW, MY FAVORITE OF THE FOUR seasons. We get all four here, and they come at us under the doors, in through the windows. One morning you wake and need blankets; you take the fan out of the window to see clouds that mist out by midmorning, only to reveal a naked blue coolness like God yawning.

September is perfect Oregon. The blocks line up like postcards and the rosebuds bloom into themselves like children at bedtime. And in Portland we are proud of our roses; year after year, we are proud of them. When they are done, we sit in the parks and read stories into the air, whispering the gardens to sleep.

I come here, to Palio Coffee, for the big windows. If I sit outside, the sun gets on my computer screen, so I come inside, to this same table, and sit alongside the giant panes of glass. And it is like a movie out there, like a big screen of green, and today there is a man in shepherd's clothes, a hippie, all dirty, with a downed bike in the circle lawn across the street. He is eating bread from the bakery and drinking from a metal camp cup. He is tapping the cup against his leg, sitting like a monk, all striped in fabric. I wonder if he is happy, his blanket strapped to the rack on his bike, his no home, his no job. I wonder if he has left it all because he hated it or because it hated him. It is true some do not do well with conventional life. They think outside things and can't make sense of following a line. They see no walls, only doors from open space to open space, and from open space, supposedly, to the mind of God, or at least this is what we hope for them, and what they hope for themselves.

I remember the sweet sensation of leaving, years ago, some ten now, leaving Texas for who knows where. I could not have known about this beautiful place, the Oregon I have come to love, this city of great people, this smell of coffee and these evergreens reaching up into a mist of sky, these sunsets spilling over the west hills to slide a red glow down the streets of my town.

And I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace south to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow's storm brewing over a high desert. 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. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

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.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.

Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can't find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all of this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.

HERE IS SOMETHING I FOUND TO BE TRUE: YOU DON'T start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

I'll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time...

It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.


-I read this author's note for the first time in a couple of months the day after I had searched and found George Fox. I was bored and I pulled it out of my bag. I usually don't read the author's note when I start the book again but I did this time.
Oregon's everywhere now. George Fox ads are everywhere now. Things referring to leaving are everywhere now.
I was looking around for tumblr layouts and on this janky tumblr layout page I found on google there was a george fox ad. (i've never seen one before this)
I was on a coffee date with my friend Brittney from College and the coffee collar was made in Portland, Oregon.
I was watching "the best places I've ever been" with my mom this morning and the first place was a beach in Oregon.
My COR 102 class has had this theme for the past month- The Exodus. We're trying to write ourselves into the Exodus story which is about transformation, and leaving.
There was an activity for Vespers the other night and when you came in you got to grab a card with a picture on it. Out of 100 possibilities, I picked up the card that had a person walking away with a backpack and books in their hand, at a university.

Those are only a few off the top of my head, but this is always on my mind.
If I don't go, I'll regret it for the rest of my life. I'll always wonder, "What was waiting for me there?"