My wife and I spent the past several days driving back and forth to El Paso, Texas, our old home, to be in a wedding. Two of our dear friends were getting hitched which provided a nice excuse to get back and see all of our old people (or most, I should say).
I had an odd relationship with El Paso. When we first moved there from Colorado I pined away for my beloved former state. Our return visits were fraught with emotion at having to return to El Paso. There were a few times my sullenness almost got the best of me at about Raton Pass, New Mexico. I longed for Colorado because I wanted to be back in Colorado. I considered it my true home and in El Paso I always felt like a usurper, a foreigner.
But slowly, and almost imperceptibly, it became home. We bought a house, started running the local mountain-biking trails, I joined an Ultimate Frisbee group; we had come down with a church and those people became like family. Everyone from our church unable to travel to be with family for Thanksgiving spent last Thanksgiving together. We had a huge meal and played football in a park and watched a Harry Potter movie. We all slept on the floor together in our host’s living room. It was one of the best Thanksgivings I have ever had.
When I quit my job in early January of this year and started taking classes in the spring everything in El Paso started to line-up. I remember going for runs thinking I would probably live here for the next 10 or 15 years. And, remarkably, I was OK with that. But that wasn’t to be the case. A few months later the moving truck was packed and we were headed to Kansas. It hurt to do that. It didn’t hurt because I loved the desert weather and was looking with grave anticipation to enduring an indefinite number of Midwest winters. It wasn’t because I was going to miss having mountains in my backyard and rocky trails to run on. It wasn’t even that I was no longer going to be able to play Frisbee three times a week. What hurt was leaving the people who had become my family.
The older I get the more I realize how much more important the people around you are than the physical location around you. The great blessing of my life is Christian fellowship. I have been held up by this force when everything around me is crumbling. I have been borne aloft to heights of community, love, and compassion that I never imagined possible. In many ways El Paso is a transient city. And I was easily a pilgrim there. But I wasn’t going alone.
Therefore, the best part of returning was returning to people. It was wonderful to go to Carlsbad Caverns, wonderful to camp out in the desert on a warm December night, wonderful to hike the old mountains and jog the old trails, but the best part was seeing the people we love so much. The first people to know us as Toby and Clara Coffman. Our fellow travelers.
Everything about physical El Paso was familiar yet foreign. I knew the streets by heart and didn’t have to think about where I was going while I drove, but it felt strange in its familiarity. It was no longer home. I was only visiting. But the people were not foreign or strange. They were the ones I loved, the ones I had been at the hospital with the day their children were born, the ones I had sweated out three years of life with. People are my home, my only home on this earth. And though time destroys everything temporal in its path, my relationships with these people are eternal and untouchable.
No comments:
Post a Comment