green pastures

(big personal life update)

because I don’t know how to gracefully segue into my news, I’ll start with the punchline and then share a bit of behind-the-scenes: this coming summer, I’ll be leaving my beloved Cambridge and moving to Washington, DC. and before you toss, “we all saw that coming,” my way (because yes, I do visit several times a year because yes, many of my closest friends live there), let me tell you it’s been a long and complicated path to reach this moment.

however for today, rather than explain the plot points, I’m going to focus on the internal (emotional, spiritual) elements of situation.

so. technically I’ve known I was moving to DC since March 9th, 2024. while I’ve loved my visits, I always literally thanked God I didn’t live there (not trying to be rude; it’s just never been my vibe). on that particular day, however, the Holy Spirit interrupted my thoughts with a warning that it would someday be my home. despite how sure I was that it had been his voice speaking to me, I did not, like Mary, humbly and joyfully respond, “may it be done to me according to your will”. my reaction instead was tears and something dangerously close to defiant despair:

“moving me here would be a curse,” I said (aloud, I think).

“any place that I bring you will be to bless you and not to curse you,” was the Lord’s answer, but I begged him to not make me talk about it yet, and we left it alone. later that weekend, though, I tearfully confessed all to Gill (my beloved flatmate in case you don’t know), and she admitted that the Lord had told her the very same thing a few months before.

we cried, agreed that we didn’t think it was happening any time soon, and tried to go back to normal life with this strange, uncertain countdown hanging over our heads.

normal life, as many of you know, has also been pretty unclear for me the last ~three years. after leaving a longterm job at my church certain that God was ushering me toward the next thing, I have found myself treading water, in a way, trying to figure out what that next thing might be. I’ve begged the Lord to show me and, again and again, he has given me big sweeping promises and asked me to trust him to work out the particulars.

then last spring—and keep in mind I’m skipping over plot points that are too intricate to explain here—Gill’s impending professional shifts brought the question back to the surface, and we decided to pray and ask the Lord if he wanted us to think about leaving sooner than later.

I was petsitting that week, so we agreed to take those few days apart to pray separately and then share what we heard from the Holy Spirit. I think we both knew that something had shifted in the conversation, that this wasn’t just a vague idea a decade down the road after all. instead, it felt eerily possible that this might be the answer to both of our prayers for the Lord to reveal his next move to us.

over those two or three days, we had identical dreams telling us that the things we’d been praying for were waiting in DC, confirmations from friends who had no idea what we were each processing, and, most importantly and most impossible to dismiss, total peace from the Holy Spirit about the concept, mingled with grief as it was from the start.

I wish that with that peace had come easiness. telling the Lord that my life is his to do with what he pleases is all well and good until obedience looks like leaving my family, best friends, and beloved community/city. I’m not going to try to explain here how hard this past summer was; Psalm 56 says that the Lord keeps every one of our tears in a (metaphorical) bottle, but he could have filled a reservoir with mine.

despite the grief, though, my resolve to obey has only been strengthened. even when I found myself praying, “is there any other way?”, the Lord was generous enough to give me yet another dream to reassure me and answer my questions, or another perfectly-timed voice memo from a friend, or another moment of comfort in scripture to assure me that he would be with me even in sorrow.

since the Spring’s revelations that the move would be sooner than later, I’ve been back to DC to visit three times, I think. each time, I’ve told the Lord (and my friends), “okay, sell me on this place.” I’ve gone on sunrise prayer walks, sabbath coffee shop excursions, and hunts for parks and likely neighborhoods, always hoping for a moment of breakthrough, when I’d say, “oh, I think I’ll love this place after all.” instead, I’ve mostly cried a lot and missed home. each time, I’ve found myself rehearsing the familiar fear, “what if I move here and all the hard things from back home just get harder because I won’t even have my family and friends? what if I move here and I’m lonely all the time?”

in response to these fears, I have a truth to cling to instead: in October, I attended my church’s women’s retreat, where one of my friends led a meditation on the familiar words of Psalm 23. she said she would read it a few times aloud and then we’d each take time to ask for the Holy Spirit’s insight and then write down our reflections.

“the Lord is my shepherd,” she began, speaking slowly, pausing between each line.

“I shall not want.”

“he makes me lie down in green pastures.”

“he leads me beside still waters.”

“he restores my soul.”

then she began again. as silly as it sounds, I felt frustrated that she cut off where she did. I didn’t realize just how frustrated until she repeated the segment a couple of times and then invited us to pray, and my first thought was, “well I’ll just read the rest of the psalm before I pray because everyone knows that the ‘valley of the shadow of death’ is just as much a part of the story as the ‘green pastures’ and ‘still waters’ and I won’t be skipping it.” by God’s grace, I was immediately convicted. it’s not often that the Lord speaks sternly to me, but I felt like he sat me down and said firmly, “your mailing address is green pastures and still waters. it is not the valley. I walk with you through the valley but you receive mail in the green pastures. that is your home, and that is your story. that is where I am bringing you.”

how can I honestly ball up my fists and stomp my feet and tell my faithful Shepherd that he is not to be trusted when he promises to bless me and asks me to trust that his goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life? how can I justify recoiling from the path he has directed me down when I have no idea yet how much joy it may bring me, and more importantly, how much glory he will receive and how blessed others might be if I am obedient?

in the end I will always choose to be where my Father is, even when I don’t yet see how it could be good news. it’s been very strange to feel simultaneously that even as I am drowning in grief, I am also overjoyed to obey the will of my father.

my friend asked me the other day if I could live anywhere in the world, where I would pick. and while San Diego and Dublin flashed through my mind as places I’ve dreamed of returning to long-term, I told him I’d choose Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I meant it. to some, that will make me sound insane, and I’m okay with that. I love this city, like I belong to her and she to me. but my final answer to that question is that I actually just want to be in the place that my father has prepared for me. my deepest joy—the food that sustains me, as Jesus says—is to do the will of my Father. that’s the only way I know I’m going to be all right.

one of the dreams that I had last summer featured me and Gill telling our friends that we couldn’t go to church with them because we were going to a budding revival service that had begun in another city. we were held back and scolded for going somewhere unfamiliar, but we freed ourselves and I said, “you’re right, we don’t know what to expect, and that’s scary, but we have to go wherever the Holy Spirit is.” I don’t want the Lord’s second best, even if that would mean staying in the place I love.

right now, my dearest hope is to return to the Cambridge area in the not-too-distant future. by nature of the faith I cherish, my hands remain open for the Lord to give and take as he chooses, which means I may fall in love with DC and never leave, or I may come back, or I may end up in Boise. it’s actually impossible to know, and feels very vulnerable. Henry Nouwen, in The Inner Voice of Love, writes, “trust is so hard, since you have nothing to fall back on. still, trust is what is essential. the new country is where you are called to go, and the only way to go there is naked and vulnerable.”

I don’t have a job yet (hit me up if you have ideas…but for real), and not a single logistical detail has been confirmed. my life is wholly at the Lord’s disposal, and that—even when painful—is the greatest freedom and joy I could ask for.

the very last thing I’ll say, because I’ve promised to be honest about the bad and the good, is that in looking ahead to this strange new chapter ahead of me, I can already see many of the blessings that the Lord has orchestrated for me before asking me to get up and go to a land I don’t yet know (little Hebrews 11 reference for you): Gill will be with me. several of my dearest friends in all the world live in DC. I might already have a church I love there. I’ll only be an hour’s flight from home. and the Lord has doubled and tripled down on the fact that he is moving me to increase his blessing in my life, not diminish it.

I’ll doubtless write a whole post about this as I continue to process the impending move, but in C. S. Lewis’ The Horse & His Boy, there’s a scene where the boy Shasta walks all night and into the morning up a foggy path, led only by the voice of (unbeknownst to him) Aslan beside him. when the sun comes up and clears away the mist, he sees that he was walking beside a sheer cliff face all along, and could have died if he had not been guided by the lion. the metaphor isn’t an exact parallel, but I feel its truth: that I’m walking through fog, and the only guide I have is the voice of the Lord beside me. I trust him to keep my feet from stumbling, and to protect me from the danger of the chasms on either side of me.

somehow, I’m scared and I’m secure. as the song says, “I may not know what the day may bring, but I know who brings the day”. and he is the same one who leads me beside still waters, makes me lie down in green pastures, and restores my soul.

the most beautiful view of Ross Lake, in North Cascades National Park (2023).