Travelin’ On
Isaiah 43:18–19
“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!”
Abandoned places call me home somehow. Even though there’s no going back in.
I’ve been thinking about how places that no longer hold life still hold meaning.
Standing in front of the Motel Inn, I remembered the day I sat at the edge of the rubble where my childhood home once stood after it was demolished. Not even one wall intact. All was lost. Here, I was able to feel a more reflective kind of grief, one that isn’t buried by tears.
These places don’t invite you back inside.
They don’t offer shelter or a promise of restoration.
They simply stand as evidence that something once lived here.
For a long time, I believed that trusting God meant being right.
Right about what He promised.
Right about what I heard.
Right about what I stayed for.
I thought if I could just understand it correctly, I could will broken pieces back into place, or at the very least, make sense of the loss.
I am realizing that sometimes the deeper wound isn’t that things end, but the doubt that’s created within myself.
To mistrust the voice of God within me feels like a much greater loss.
I assumed that if something broke, I must have misheard Him.
I stand here now understanding that I don’t have perfect faith.
Never did. Probably never will.
What I’m learning is that grace meets me in the rubble of buried things.
And grace allows love to be honored in places that are no longer meant to be lived in.
That doesn’t make them meaningless.
Maybe it simply makes them complete.
As I stood before the only remaining wall of this once-erect building, I remembered what was.
I bless it for the shelter it once gave… however imperfect.
And then I leave it where it belongs.
There’s no going back in.
Just travelin’ on.
God knows.
