Leaving and Staying

Before I bought my grandmother's house in 2022, I had moved four times in five years. When I moved into the house, I had no plans of buying it, but over time one of the chief reasons I decided to buy was because I was sick of putting my life in boxes and asking friends and family to help me haul things around the city. I had moved in September 2017, June 2019, December 2020, and then finally into my grandmother's house in December 2021. I joked with my parents shortly after I formally purchased the house in June 2022 that they could just bury me in the backyard someday because I was never moving again.

This is a radical change from how I spent virtually all of my college and young adult years. It was then that I did the bulk of my traveling and leaving. If my memory serves me correctly, before I left for college, I had been on a plane precisely two times—to and from Alaska with my parents and grandmother in the summer of 2002. But during and after college, I lived to be on the go. I dreaded the thought of being in one place for too long. I was terrified of getting ‘stuck.’ So, I just stayed in perpetual motion, the restlessness a raging force in my life: Missouri, Russia, San Diego, North Carolina, Kenya (twice!), Guatemala. And, of course, I picked up friends from these places along the way, who were also coming from other parts of the country, so then I’d go back to visit them, or we’d meet up somewhere. Missouri was the longest stint, living out there six out of seven years while I finished both undergrad and grad school. It was an interesting sensation when I watched the movie Up In the Air—which was filmed primarily in the St. Louis airport and was the airport I flew in and out of while I lived in Missouri—and essentially knew which terminal almost all the airport scenes were filmed.

Then it seemed that when I hit my thirties, I discovered a figurative set of brakes, or at least how to pump them. Life slowed down, and the restless tug grew quieter and quieter. The last time I went overseas was when I was twenty-nine. The desire to leave the country seemingly vanished, and I set my sights on more domestic longings. I was thirty-one when I went to Jackson Hole for the first time in 2015. And then I went again, and again, and again. Once I discovered Jackson, I had little interest in going elsewhere. There were still a few places I would go on vacation to with family, but by and large, Jackson ruled the roost for me.

Now, in my forties, I prefer to just leave my life car in park altogether, especially after these last two years. I feel Nate Bargatze's clip on how he moved through the first half of his life deep in my bones because it's so on point. It reflects all too well my own progression from my twenties to my thirties and now my forties. For those in their fifties and beyond, feel free to to extend Nate's observations and weigh in on what the possibilities could be for my future decades.

As I've been looking back on each of these decades recently and all the moving I did, I am often reminded of how the Israelites moved about after they came out of slavery in Egypt. I recently started attending a new church over the last several months, and it has already become dear to me in a very short amount of time. The pastor decided over three years ago to preach through the entirety of the Bible, verse by verse, beginning with Genesis 1. He just reached the fourth book of the Bible, Numbers, when I arrived in October.

The book of Numbers follows the Hebrew people in the days and months immediately following their freedom from Egypt and slavery. They have crossed the Red Sea and are now in the desert. God is giving them the purity laws, explaining to them the ways in which they are to conduct themselves as his chosen people. He’s also explaining to them how to lay out their camp according to the tribes, with the tabernacle at the center of all they do. He chooses a cloud to indicate his presence, which is perpetually present, serving as an indicator of God's continual presence with his people. If the cloud moved, the people of God were to move. It didn’t matter how long or short they had been in camp; they moved when God moved.

Think about this: over one million people were living in tents, and all their worldly possessions with them, including their livestock. Every time they moved, they had to pack their clothes, gather their herds, families, and all that they had plundered from the Egyptians (with God's permission!), pull up tent stakes, pack up the tents, and move. And then, when they arrived at wherever it was God intended they should go, they did everything in reverse order. Sometimes they moved multiple times within a week; sometimes, maybe once a year. But they did this countless times—for forty years. Packing, leaving, unpacking, staying. Packing, leaving, unpacking, staying. Wash, rinse, repeat, over and over and over again. Numbers 9:18, 22-23 explains:

At the command of the Lord the people of Israel set out, and at the command of the Lord they camped. As long as the cloud rested over the tabernacle, they remained in camp. Whether it was two days, or a month, or a longer time that the cloud continued over the tabernacle, abiding there, the people of Israel remained in camp and did not set out; but when it lifted, they set out. At the command of the Lord they camped, and at the command of the Lord they set out. They kept the charge of the Lord at the command of the Lord by Moses.

I can’t fathom that kind of nomadic lifestyle. What if they didn’t want to move? What if they liked that particular piece of ground? What if someone in their family physically didn’t feel well and traveling was difficult?

It didn’t matter if they didn’t want to, didn’t feel well, or were tired. What mattered above all else was the presence of God. They moved when God moved. And if he wasn’t moving, then they weren’t moving either. I wonder what I would have done if I were among the Israelites. Would I have become bitter over what felt like such a grueling exercise in futility and inefficiency? Or would have there have been any part of me that would have appreciated the process or been grateful, beholding the wonder that was the presence of God himself in a cloud? Would I have been asking God why he couldn't just get us to our destination in a single trip? 

There's a lot of things God was teaching the Israelites through the use of the cloud, but one of which was to see that the staying and leaving both mattered, for however long. God was teaching them to be tuned to his presence above all else—above their own preferences, above their own wellbeing, and above their own longings. Because whether staying or going, it meant proximity to the presence of God and it was proof that they were a people marked, sheltered, and protected by God himself. Moses, the leader of this mass of nomadic people, said in Exodus 33:15-16 explained why the presence of God mattered so much, “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?”

Moses was desperately pleading with God to not send them somewhere that God himself would not go with them, for who were the Israelites if Immanuel, which literally translates not just to the "God Who is With Us," but to "the With-Us God", did, in fact, not go with them? What was going to set them apart from everyone else on the face of the earth? It would be meaningless for them to go anywhere that God was not, and Moses inherently knew this. The Promised Land was a meaningless promise if God did not go with them.

I hope God physically doesn't move me again anytime soon, but I want to be where the With-Us God is, attentive to his Holy Spirit and his workings. And I'm not just talking about whether I continue to live in this house or not. It can also mean other spaces and categories. I don't want to be in a job where he isn't. I don't want to be in a friendship where he isn't. I don't want to be in a conversation where he isn't. Yes, I understand that we as believers who live under the power of the New Covenant do not live like the Old Covenant Israelites where God did not dwell in them. I have the power of the Living God in and with me at all times. So, I don't actually need to ask God to be with me like Moses did, but I do still have to be aware of his Holy Spirit. I often pray Galatians 5:25, that I would keep in step with the Spirit. If he moves, I want to move with him. If he's telling me to pull up stakes, then I'm pulling up stakes. If he's telling me to write something specific, then I'm writing something specific. If he's telling me to text a particular person with a particular encouragement, I'm texting. From the big to the small, I want to be where he is. For how else will anyone know that I belong to him? I want to go where the cloud of his presence goes, leaving and staying when he leaves and when he stays.

Who knows what the remainder of my forties look like, but I hope that no matter what decade I'm in that I'm moving wherever the presence of God is, even if I do have to pack up boxes. Again.

Health update

Treatment already feels like it was some sort of dark, distant nightmare, even thought it's only been four months since I took my last chemo pill. I don't know what it is exactly about the latter half of 2025, but it seems like somebody punched the light speed on humanity's collective Millennium Falcon, sending us all hurtling into space with entire galaxies whizzing by like long streams of thin white lines. And it seems as though everyone else has been feeling the same way, not just me.

I had my first post-treatment MRI last week and then met with the neuro-onc immediately after. The tumor is stable and shows no signs of growth, which is the hope for every MRI moving forward. Generally speaking, as soon as treatment was over, I didn't have any lingering symptoms other than some blood count issues. I had been working with a functional medicine nurse and nutritionist prior to treatment ending with the express intent of getting things in place so that my body would rebound well from the hits it took during treatment. And that seems to have happened. All things considered, it's a miracle that I am doing as well as I am neurologically and functionally. 

My next MRI should have been scheduled for February at the standard three month mark, but the doctor felt I was doing so well that we could go ahead and extend the interval out to April, which is good news. I still have a smattering of appointments between now and then, most of which are just routine care and check ins with other specialists. All in all, I am doing well, by the goodness and grace of God!