Homeward Bound, an Increadable Journey

Cheesey title I know. What can one do? I am going to try my hand at posting something to this blog of mine. It's been a while. My creative juices have been all but non-existant lately.

I have made a decision to move back to where the trees are higher than pride, where the earth smells like the garden of Eden, and where I was formed from it's dust and ashes. Not to the "exact" place of my formation, but near enough to it to be a short journey for a visit.

My 7 plus years in Kansas City have been...amazing. As I sell all of my possessions in a rash move to clear my life of clutter, I can't help but try to wrap all my memories, lessons, relationships, joy and pain into one neat pile. It doesn't work. I have to resign to the untidiness of history and how it doesn't all just iron out neatly when you look back.

Ophelia, my piano, was moved out of my apartment today. I played her one last time this morning, tried to sing, but my voice is so jacked up from being ill that I could barely squeak out some notes from some familiar songs. They came, those three broken men, to take away one of the only things that has kept my heart alive in the last 14 months. I am scared. I am nervous and excited. Like a little kid going to 1st grade for the first time. The anticipation of a new city, the big questions about my future, the fear of risking BIG again. I could just pee myself at the enormity of it all. But I'm graduating out of my graveyard, I'm sheding my fears and insecurites like a butterfly sheds its cocoon that has been so safe and transforming. I'm going to live. I AM GOING TO LIVE!! I AM GOING TO LIVE!!! SO HELP ME GOD!

Back to where the trees know me by heart, back to where shore air mingles with my sighing. I have never lived like this before. Never trusted like this before.

Leaving Kansas City is like leaving a family behind. I came here orphaned, and I am leaving fathered, mothered, sistered, brothered. There are going to be nights of racous laughter, and intense weeping this summer. As I say goodbye to my own memorial, to my own shrine. I'm leaving with regrets of the people I loved badly and hurt with the best intentions, I'm sorry. I'm leaving with a legacy of shedding a hard shell. I hope I'm leaving hope behind. Kansas City is not the end. You don't just come here to die and be left. There is a resurrection!

I hope that what I have learned here stays with me along with all the people that have loved me so well here.

My failures are abundant and not hard to spot, but I hope that from them comes strength and grace.

Colin, I'm moving to Portland. You wanna come??

Love always,
Anna Joy Walker

nearing 27

Its midnight. I’m trying. Trying to write, trying to live outside of my boundaries. Trying to love Jesus. I’m not actually doing anything that would be said as “loving Jesus”, but in my heart I am aware.

My season is changing. I have felt it in my heart, heard it on the wind, smelt it in rain. My twenty-seventh birthday is coming up so soon, and I remembered thinking about being 27 when I was a little girl, normally it was when we were talking about our dreams and our lives as far as what big things we were going to do at certain ages. My big age was 27 and 28, unlike my friends, whose big ages were 20 and 21. Maybe I knew back then that it would take me a while to grow up and become stable, in some sense of the word, or maybe I was just prophetic. With that in mind, I was thinking about these last years in KC and how difficult it has been. And I was asking the Lord about all of it, about the meaning behind the pain, etc. I was asking him what was in store for me for this next year of my life labeled 27. We came back to Isaiah 62. I bawled my way through it again, this time out of The Message.

Here it is. Still, I love Jesus. Still, worship is my favorite expression. Still, I need Him. Still, He is so good. Through all of our years together, still he wants me. Still, he fights for me. Still, he is worthy. Still he is beautiful.