moving Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

The Truck Didn’t Come

We woke up early because it was the day a semi-truck promised to pull down our street, big and bright and beautiful to two boys who still had a week of being four left in their bodies. Semi-trucks are always worth getting up early for, especially if they intend to park right in front of your house, close enough to touch.

The kids scrambled out of bed and stood in the empty living room, noses to glass, waiting.

But the truck didn’t come.

They pulled themselves away from the windows long enough to devour cold cereal from four borrowed bowls and a mug. Then they raced upstairs to put on shorts and t-shirts so they could stand under the hot sun and bake a little on the sidewalk while they waited. Any second now, it would be here.

But the truck didn’t come.

Jeff packed up the folding table and chairs we’d checked out from the military lending closet at Ft. Bliss and filled the minivan full to bursting with the foam mattresses we had been sleeping on all week. The kids followed him to the garage, begging to be allowed to use them to slide on down the stairs just once before he took them back.

“Don’t you have a truck to watch for?” he said as he stumbled out the door. They watched him go and listened for the rumble of eighteen wheels barreling down our street.

But the truck didn’t come.

Lunch came and went and so did every entertaining activity we could think of to do in an empty house. A few discarded Matchbox cars spun idly to a stop on the bare floor, wheels to the sky, mimicking the dead June bugs the boys were collecting in the garage. I bought a necklace I didn’t need online and Jonathan burned pricker bushes with his magnifying glass. Faith read the same book for the fifth time.

But the truck didn’t come.

Long into the afternoon we waited, watching the shadows of the neighbors’ houses stretch out across our lawn like lazy cats.

Suddenly, the shrill call of the phone broke the silence.

“How is the move going?” asked the chipper voice of our moving coordinator. She reeked of happiness, the exclusive kind of happiness that comes from sleeping in one’s own bed the night before.

“Um…they’re not here yet,” came my reply.

“What?”

“They haven’t arrived. Our stuff hasn’t arrived.” I let my mind wander to a thought of my beautiful bed, and sighed.

“Oh. JustasecwhileIchecksomething.” She rushed to hang up the phone and left me listening to the hum of the dead receiver.

The truck was not going to come.

I knew it even before the moving-coordinator-who-got-to-sleep-in-a-real-bed called me back and told me so. I knew it, but I could hardly believe it. It seemed a cruel trick to play on a woman who had been sleeping on 2 inches of foam for days when she wasn’t even camping.

I wanted to cry. How could I get settled without our stuff?

I thought back. Three weeks before, that truck had pulled away from our house, loaded down with all the things we call ours. Everything we owned was neatly packed in cardboard and bubble wrapped and inventoried so we’d half-know what to do with it when it arrived on the other end of a seventeen hundred mile journey to our new home.

Which one of you has my stuff?

I had stood by a window and watched as the crew slowly drained my house of all its possessions. I thought of my new house, which was two-dimensional in my mind, flat like a photograph of a place I had seen but never really been. It was hard to imagine what it would actually be like, and harder to imagine how I would make it feel like I belonged there.

“How do you make a place feel like home?” a friend had asked, but I fumbled at the answer.

“I’m not really sure,” I said.

“Some people like to hang up curtains right away,” she offered, but we looked at my windows, still curtainless after five years in the house, and we both knew that wasn’t my thing.

“I guess I’ll just get unpacked as quickly as I can,” I told her. “I think once all of our stuff arrives and I get unpacked, it will feel like home.”

But the truck hadn’t come.

And all of the things I had counted on to make a house a home where stuck somewhere between Washington and Texas.

Except six.

That night, those six people sat around a rickety card table in an empty house and shared a beautiful meal made by a new friend in honor of what we thought would be our moving-in day. It was a meal the kids declared the best thing they’d ever eaten because my ability to microwave soup and Minute Rice were no match for Mrs. Harvey’s baked spaghetti and homemade bread.

We wrestled the black foam mattresses back up the steps after driving back to the military installation to re-borrow them, and arranged all five kids in the largest room. Sleeping on foam mattresses in a great big room is loads of fun when you are not yet old enough to know that sometimes, you wake up and your back hurts. Giggles erupted down the hallway as Faith recounted our made-up leprechaun stories and Micah declared Paul the winner of his stinky foot contest.

It occurred to me, as I arranged my bones over my borrowed bed, that home is not about the stuff.

It’s about the story. And all the time I had been waiting for our stuff, the story was already being written.

God has opened up a fresh new page and started writing the words He loves to write: “In the beginning…”

It is beautiful to be in the beginning with God, to be nestled into the pages of the story He’s writing for us and to know that we are wanted right where we are. Any other place on this earth would never feel like home now, whether all of our boxes arrived or not, because God is not writing the story anywhere else. He is writing it here.

(With the exception of my bed), none of the stuff really matters. We are here. We are safe. We are together. And we have one grand adventure unfolding right before our eyes.

Home is where the story is written. It is the place where God molds the characters and reveals the plot. It is where His story becomes our history.

This story, so full of the thoughts and intentions of God, will be told around angel fires long after the stuff has crumbled into dust.

The truck didn’t come. But the story is off to a great start.

Finally!

In Morning

I am usually the first one up in the morning. Sometimes my husband sneaks out for work while I’m still dreaming, but on the days when there’s a choice, I’m the first one up. In all my years of marriage and mothering, I find that I like it that way, that I am better that way.

There is something about a new day that makes it hard to speak at first, and harder to talk. It’s better if I slip out of bed and into the quiet of the house where I can wrap my fingers around a warm mug and collect the thoughts that have settled in the night without having to respond to the thoughts of others.

I am not sad, or sullen—it’s just that I like to awaken to the miracle that is each new day in silence and solitude. It is my way of being in morning, of greeting the newness of each new day with the quiet acceptance that God has called me to it.

I have been in morning lately, ever since we packed up our house and headed to this new and unfamiliar place. I have been bleary-eyed and silent, not because I am sad, but because this sunrise has stolen the breath right out of me.

There is so much to say—too much, really, and I have found that I could not say any of it, not yet, because it is almost too glorious, this dawn. It is almost too much to take in and too much to speak of and too much to condense down into words.

I feel a bit like a slave-born Israelite, waking up on the first morning on the other side of the sea, surrounded by the plunder of Pharaoh’s and the keen awareness of how a child’s spilled blood set me free. In the night, angels swooped terrible-close and waters bowed before me as if I was a child of a King and the clouds caught fire and led me far from the shrieks of my captors and right into the center of His will, so close to Him, I could almost watch His footprints melt into the sand.

What can you say on a morning like that? What words are sufficient?

It is all too much, all too glorious, all too heavy with the holy because I know He is here. I know He was in the leading because sure as anything this is not what I would have chosen. This is not what I wanted, if I thought about what I wanted without really thinking about how all I really want is to be where He is.

He is here, and there is a bright star hanging over my house each night because this is my stable. This is my Bethlehem. This is where I was meant to find Him.

So I am sitting in the quiet, letting my senses awaken to something that is so rich and full and deep, I can only taste a little of it at a time. It is beautiful, all of it, and different, and it has struck me dumb because it is like seeing another side of my Father, familiar, but completely new, like seeing God in a babe or God in a bush—I have never before seen this kind of beauty, and yet, I know it.

And I know enough to know that this is the kind of thing you take off your shoes for. In this kind of place, it is best if your knees taste dirt and your tongue turns slack. Here is where you wait—silent—while the Spirit does the rushing.

In this quiet place, in my morning, I see that He is here. He is to be found in the great depths of blue sky that swim across the crumbled mountains and in the precious pools of water that gather in the hollows of the desert.

He is here, on this glorious new day, and I am in morning. I am not sad, or sullen. I’m just waking up to His presence in this place. And it is altogether too much for words.

Here

The clouds were horses, kicking up their great feathery tails across the blue sky. I watched those skipping mares as I hung the laundry on the line. Change is coming, they seemed to say. Change is coming.

I felt it.

The sky was warm and comfortable like blue jeans, faded around the edges, and the grass stuck to my feet in little bits because the lawn mower had beaten me to the backyard. All around was the scent of the wash, fresh and clean, and the song of the robin in the trees.

It was hard to believe that tomorrow, it would rain. Tomorrow, things would change.

I looked out at the horizon and thought about all the things I needed to do before it rained. The laundry was only half done. The yard was full of rakes and shovels and the pile of mulch was not much smaller than when I started that day. There was trim to be painted and a shrub to be trimmed and…

…and suddenly, I was so caught up in the change to come that I was no longer here. I was out on the horizon, where the storm clouds mount and gather their arms. I was so far ahead, wrapped up in the change to come, that I could not appreciate the blessing and goodness of this.

This.

Here.

Now.

Change is coming, but it is not here yet. Here is where the blessing is that God has for this day. Here is where my home is, for a little while longer, and here is where my children sleep and my husband smiles and my neighbors call. Here is where God has put me.

Even though I know I am moving on, I am not there yet. I am here. But my temptation is to look so far ahead that I forget that my feet are not where my eyes are. I am not there yet.

I think to myself that this is why God leads me step by step. He knows that if He gave me a larger vision, I would look so far ahead, I would miss everything in between.

He wants me here.

So I dusted off the mixer that has been decluttered to some remote corner of my kitchen cupboards and made cookies when I should have been painting, and I called the kids around to have one when the chocolate chips were still gooey and warm.

“Mom made cookies?” They were incredulous, because Mom has been so far over there that she has completely forgotten about things like homemade cookies and afternoon tea.

Who has the time to make cookies when they’ve got a house to sell?

Not me. Not unless I remember that I’m still here, and sometimes, kids need a mom who makes cookies when she should be painting.

I found a bit of myself in that plate of cookies, and I reeled her back in. This is still where I belong, I thought to myself. Here.

Every few years from now until my husband retires from the chaplaincy, we will move. We will get orders for some new location and suddenly, our home will start to slip away to make way for a new one. The temptation for me will be to slip away with it, to close out chapters before they are complete simply because I know the title of the next one.

I should know better. The best parts of chapters often come at the end, and I don’t want to miss a word.

I don’t want to miss a cookie break with my kids, or a conversation with a dear friend on my faded green couch in the middle of a living room full of chaos. I don’t want to miss the lilacs that bloom in my front yard, or the opportunity to bring them in in great big bunches that fill up my home with spring. I don’t want to miss a quiet evening on the deck with my husband, when the sky becomes a canvas and the colors spill out over the water.

By evening, the laundry was in off the line and the clouds had covered up the sun. My tea flushed and steamed in the rush of cool air, and high in the evergreens, the robin sang his evening song to me.

Things are about to change, he said to me.

I knew it.

But for now, I am here.