What brings me here?

It is both difficult and simple to trace the influences that brought me where I am now. Not that I claim such great complexity, but rather that I find myself at a crossroad that I never expected to reach at this point in my life. It is easy to understand the impact from various directions and to various paths that my friends and family have pushed me, but it is more difficult to describe how my own experiences have shaped me. Through God’s grace and beautiful will, I believe I’ve immerged from a unique Christian home to play my part in this world, as more than a “Christian”, more than a woman, and more than just a child in adult form.

My family must be cited as the first, and possibly greatest, foundation for my development. My parents were mid-1970s Jesus Movement Christians, living for several years at a place called “Lamb’s Chapel” in Charlotte, with a dozen other families, couples, and single people in community. They ate together, worked together, worshipped together, and served one another, inspired by the descriptions of the early Church in Acts 2. Earthy, creative and outdoorsy, my parents had met at a bluegrass festival, later spent their honeymoon camping on the Outer Banks, and then spent the eight years before they had children taking road trips, playing music, writing songs, and apprenticing to a master potter, in my mother’s case. They began their married life as near to pure hippies as they could get. Every choice they made and everything they taught me and my siblings stemmed from this history. My two brothers and I were homeschooled through all the way through high school, and one of the most important aspects of our education was the freedom to pursue our interests. Many of the homeschooling families in our community liked to involve their children in a great many “good” pursuits, such as music lessons, dance lessons, 4-H, church activities, etc, and most of my friends were spread so thinly across so many disciplines, it was not until college that they had the opportunity to discover what they loved. My parents however, recognized early that if we were encouraged in the things that we were truly interested in, we would find greater success, greater fulfillment, and greater purpose. Of course we still received a superb scholastic education; but the particulars and extracurriculars were our own. My older brother loved technology and computer science from an early age, and so he was encouraged to dig as deeply as he wished. My younger brother bounced from passion to passion, mostly physical things, from skateboarding to weight training to other more extreme sports, until high school, when he found his brilliant aptitude and love of music and surpassed all his teachers in his skill at guitar playing. I always loved art and literature, so every Christmas and birthday brought new drawing supplies, Barnes and Noble gift cards, and, my favorite, blank notebooks.

My mother and father each influenced me in different ways. Much like I look like both my mother and father, so my person reflects an inheritance from both. My mother was the loving, innocent parent, the parent I wished I had taken after, but hadn’t. She instilled in me my first love of books, and it was her patient reading and gentle critiquing that kept me on my way to being a writer. She used to read aloud to the whole family in the evenings after dinner, keeping us centered on our home and establishing a continuing tradition of family fellowship. She is gentle, sensitive, creative, beautiful, and she is happiest walking through her garden with her cat leaping through the grass behind her. She had a connection to the outdoors, but not in a New Age sense, nor in a naturalist sense. Rather, she knew there was more behind the leaves and mountains, and though she never spoke of her more spiritual beliefs about nature, I was never ignorant of the significance she placed on her connection.

My father is, at times, too much like me for me to get along with him. It seems that he and I have never made small talk. Either we talk not at all, or we find ourselves in the deepest and most honest of discussions. In personality, he is not quite as loud and outgoing as I am, nor is he, frankly, as silly as I am. But perhaps that is due to a difference in sex. But despite the outward manifestations, at the heart, my father and I are much alike. He and I share an incongruous mix of pragmatism, cynicism, and a stronghold of unwavering, unworrying trust in God’s providence. There is little romanticism in either of us, and even less compassion for foolishness, and it is very rare for us to love. We have each lived through the attacks of more inner demons than external trials, and somehow we have been made stronger for it. His lifelong struggle with depression, and his understanding of the effects of such struggles, paved the way for me to arm myself against my own mental struggles.

More later.... :)