What's Your Soundtrack?

It is a quiet evening, a gentle rain falls outside with a cool spring breeze blowing in our cozy upstairs bedroom window.  I don’t mind the rain tonight.  As it brings in that fresh forest smell of Portland I am reminded of something Frederick Buechner wrote in his autobiographical work The Sacred Journey. He commented that rain makes home somehow feel more home.  So, it is fitting that home should feel more like home tonight in this final full week of our life here in Portland.  My mind shifts from thoughts as mundane as “Should I go ahead and buy one more package of toilet paper or should we just use up those last boxes of tissues in the linen closet?” to the more significant goodbyes and letting go of roots planted over the last three years.

A friend in Boston once asked me, “If someone would put a soundtrack to your life, like, say, your life was a movie, what would that soundtrack be?.”  I think about that tonight as the impending changes that lie ahead of us in the coming weeks bring back memories of changes in the past, of goodbyes to some and ‘Hello, my  name is..’ to others.  And then those 'hello' others become precious dear ones to whom we say goodbyes again.  For at least six months or more I have lived in... 

Atlanta, GA

Chapel Hill, NC

Florence, Italy

Boston, MA

Philadelphia, PA

Houston, TX

Chattanooga, TN

Portland, OR

and...soon to come Chicago, IL

Sometimes I have been really ready to leave, sometimes not ready to leave but excited, sometimes ready but scared and sad, and sometimes a cocktail of all of these emotions. I am thankful for each place that I have landed.  I realize in hindsight the amazing opportunities given and people from whom I have learned and loved, and I don't regret.  Each place has changed me, has shown me more of the depth of the richness of God's goodness to us in relationship and his mercy to us in our failings. I think about the soundtrack that should accompany my life, the “mixed tape” (for you fellow children of the eighties), that would play.    What is yours?  Has it changed over time?  What songs would play if someone was watching your life?