The Mastery of Unpacking

If you've ever lived out of a suitcase, for any period of time, you know to some extent the mastery of packing. Keep it simple. Keep it small. Take only the essentials and make sure you have just enough of what you need to make it through until your next stop. Life is simple.

Until you unpack.

There is an art of unpacking, I'm sure of it. It's something I have not mastered yet. Maybe I never will. The question for me is always, where to begin? Do I start with the trip itself? Or the cleaning and putting away of the contents of my bags? Or maybe by telling my stories or writing them down so I can begin the processing of what happened? To be truthful, I often just set my bags on my bed, put the worst smelling items in the laundry and make myself a cup of coffee. It's overwhelming when I sit down, sipping my coffee, to think about three months worth of living to and how to explain it. Where to begin? What to say? What to highlight? What to mourn? How can any and all of these things be put into words? What if I don't even quite know how to describe the feelings, the depth, even just the simple sounds that I miss?

And so I propose to you all this: A story a week. I know, life keeps on moving forward. The leaves will change colors soon and I'll still be talking about spring blooming in the mountains of Wyoming. There will be new stories mixed in with old ones. But at least I can promise you some depth to them and not just an overview. An overview, in my mind, seems a great injustice to the depth of the people I was with and the ripe nature of each and every experience. And my hope is that you will see God's timely presence in each and every story. There was a book we read on the first course I co-instructed that talked about "story feasting" - a place to share openly the stories that we have with one another and celebrate or cry or mourn or be still with one another in the sharing of our lives.

So here's to a spread of stories for you to read, spanning from June 1 to August 28. I hope that they are worth your while to read and, that like all good stories, they inspire you to share yours with those around you.