1.14.2004

Moving

Has it ever occurred to you that moving is one of the most stressful things possible? Maybe it isn't like that for you; it is for me. I find the uprootedness puts me into an anti-productive state that I have to fight tooth and nail in order to accomplish anything. The concept of home is very important to me -- I need to have a home that is safe and familiar and can offer me a refuge from the rest of life . . . and when I don't have that waiting for me I find myself feeling lost.

I know that my childhood plays a big part in this (seriously) -- the amount of traveling my family did when I was young made it very necessary that we have a home base to return to. "Home" really was very different from "away" -- and home is all the more welcome when contrasted with the stresses of an "away" that is on another continent with people who don't speak your language. Now "away" may only be Starbucks but I still have that ingrained sense of need for protection, for refuge, for my home to be my fortress of defense against all that is not safe.

And to some degree I have not had that in a while -- we have been living with my mom in her house for the past 7 months while we have been in California . . . and while that has been very smooth and worked out very well, it's something of a sense of being in someone else's fortress for me. Mind you, that's far better than being in no fortress at all -- but I long to have a refuge that is my own, designed to meet the needs of my own family. Yet in the mean time our little corner of this fortress has been ransacked; familiar things packed away and replaced by the sight of their boxes, hard, cold, and unfamiliar. To be fair, I have to say that all corners of this fortress have been ransacked -- Brewsters packing is a force that can hardly be contained to one room of the house. There's stuff everywhere!

But all of that is to say that I'm kind of going crazy right now with the stresses of preparing for this move. Please pray for our survival and sanity as we still have about two weeks' worth of work to cram into the next two days.

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