Journeying through Diversity

When I was growing up my family moved a lot of different places.  My father was  a career navy man leaving his  Alabama textile Mill town to become something more in the United States military. His travels landed he and my mother and my sister in Groton, Connecticut where I was born . 

We lived in  various coastal cities such as Charleston, South Carolina, Norfolk, VA and as far west as San Diego Ca.  We also lived in Columbus ,GA .  I never thought that my years of traveling with my parents would put me in a position of being ready for adventure in my married life but since my marriage we have lived in several states  traveling and living in numerous locations and experiencing many diverse people and cultures.
 

  As our children grew up and moved out they too embraced an adventurous lifestyle and have settled into living with diversity in their own sense of the exploration.  As adults some have decided to make deep roots and others are ready to pull them up and be planted in new soil.

Somehow, my husband and I continue to find ourselves in different situations in which we either put ourselves in a closet and try to hide (unsuccessfully I might add) or come out and experience everything that is thrown to us.

In the past few days the experiences have been as diverse as the glass pieces in a kaleidoscope.  In Chicago we dined with Zimbabwean, our daughter-in-laws parents; a young couple whose parents are from New York and originally from India; the son in law, he from London, England.  We laughed and chatted telling stories and learning about each others lives, education and culture.  Our son and daughter-in-law have certainly stretched us in ways that we would never have delved into otherwise, but oh what richness we find in the different people and places we find ourselves.

Fast forward to my husband aging parents in KY, who have hunkered down and are still independently living at the mid 80’s that they are.  We found ourselves once again adapting and empathizing with them and their lifestyle recognizing that life continues on and we are trudging towards aging as well.

Then we come in to visit our dear friends in Ohio whom we have know for at least 35 years and we pick up where we last left off laughing,lamenting, encouraging, telling stories, and relating trials and triumphs of life with each other. 
We come away from times like this feeling full and rich and blessed to be a part of someone elses life that have nurtured and encouraged and challenged us to keep growing and looking at the opportunities, to see the faithfulness of God even in the difficult times we have experienced.  We have a history with these people, they have known us in some of our most difficult times.  They have experienced the journeys of life, big, small and excruciatingly painful.  They know the raw feelings and the retching  diversity of life can cause on the psyche and the emotional stability of an individual.  And they have watched us as we experienced the joys and the sorrows and lived with us through them.

We came home for 2 days and spent a lovely evening with friends in this area experiencing yet another diverse slice of life experiencing things we have never done before and then we headed to Va to finish up the visit with my mother and step father.  Again a whole different lifestyle and set of experiences.  We saw snow covered on the MD,DL,VA coastline...something that almost never happens and brought in the new year eating collards, fresh ham and fried potatoes.  Yum!

We're home and back to reality, full from the journey with thoughts and pounds.  The pounds we've resolved to shed.  The memories we want to savor.

Every once in a while I need to get out of my comfort zone and delve into something that "jerks a knot in my tail" so to speak.  That place where someone asks you a point blank question that forces you to take stock of what the heck you are doing with your life…or that challenge that makes you angry but knocks the socks off of any train of thought or theory you have decided you may want to hang on to.  These are the kinds of diverse people we have found in our lives and that keep the journey exciting and excruciatingly painful.  Ah, but there is never the chance of leaving the old skin on…it gets torn off so something fresh can grow.  We are in the midst of a storm at sea…right now there is a calm.  We are having time to meditate and chew on the events in our past to be prepared for what is next. 

 I don’t want to accept a smooth ride with a well preserved body but rather to slide in saying "wow, what a ride."  That quote came from an anonymous person  which we found a couple of years ago before we started our second journey to PA thinking we were going to be doing something entirely different. 

Instead, we have found me in working in education and my husband unemployed contemplating options we may have never considered had we stayed in the comfortable place that we were for 16 years.

I don’t want to grow old and grow away.  I want to be like a vine that entwines itself in every nook and cranny of peoples lives and become a part of it all.  I want my life to have made a difference and to embrace every opportunity.  And when I go, I want it to be said that “she really knew how to wring out what ever there was to offer from life”  Part of that comes from embracing all the diversity and seeing it as an adventure no matter how tough it was and in it…to see the blessing.