My Neighborhood: A Love Story
“Be in love with your life. Every minute of it.”
Four years ago we moved our family from the eastside of Vancouver to a rural town an hour away. It was a huge change but my husband and I have always liked change. We also love mountains and trails, particularly when those mountains and trails are practically unpopulated which is what we had in abundance in our new location.
So when the lovely neighbor from the impeccably white house up the street welcomed me to the neighborhood that first week with, “We moved here from the city 30 years ago. I love it now but it took me about five years for it to really feel like home,” I smiled a fake yes-of-course smile but the bubble thoughts were popping all around my head. Five years? I feel at home after a week! What the heck is she talking about?!
I really should know by now that prideful self-talk like that is a guarantee that the faithful work of the Holy Spirit will begin to prune and refine and seek to bring humility; painfully slow but predictably sure. So as those first months turned into the first couple of years, it became harder and harder for my Pollyanna-esque tendencies to subdue the growing struggle that my family was having with the change.
Our kids, four teens at the time of the move, who had been accustomed to a level of independence in the city because of accessible transit, were now reliant on us for rides pretty much everywhere. Our neighborhood was not even walkable to anything besides the Esso gas station. Since they had pretty much outgrown spending their “allowance” on a bag of candy, this wasn’t much of a selling feature.
I began to cringe more and more as I walked my vinyl-siding-clad neighborhood in all the glory of 1990’s suburbia. While I didn’t miss the hustle of city life, I did long for the bustle of different cultures and wafting smells from various ethnic restaurants. Even so, I still couldn’t bring myself to admit that I didn’t feel completely at home.
For someone who is a professional pain-avoider, it can take me far too long to acknowledge my own emotions, let alone the struggles of those closest to me. For at least two years, if someone asked me if we were all settled in our new town I gave a hearty, “Oh ya! We love it!” In the meantime at least two of my kids were feeling quite lost and I had barely spoken to any of my neighbors. To be honest, I did fall in love with my town and surrounding beauty pretty quickly. But I really missed my old neighborhood and was secretly terrified that we had hurt our children.
While thinking positive thoughts and “taking every thought captive” (2Corinthians 10:5) has great merit, when we do this at the expense of our honest emotions we are missing out on experiencing an authentic walk with the Lord. For decades I learned how to be a Psalm “skimmer”. I declared that I loved the Psalms but had subconsciously developed the ability to scan for the happy or victorious or hopeful verses while conveniently ignoring the verses and, sometimes, whole Psalms of lament. I had developed a coping strategy early in my life that enabled me to ignore the bad and hard and overemphasize the good.
I can tell you that this strategy can get you far but, inevitably, the crash will come. Since God requires truth in the core of our being (Psalm 51:6), this extends to our emotions. I became an expert at emotional “wack-a-mole” and any time a negative thought would surface about the move, I would smack it down with thoughts like, it’s only moving, kids are resilient, millions of people are going through way harder stuff than you. But that was not leading me to honest and open prayer with the Lord. It wasn’t until I realized that our gracious, merciful, and kind Father wants all of it, that I began to change my prayers.
In her book, No More Faking Fine, Esther Fleece Allen describes this beautifully: “I have learned through the years that God does not want just our happy; He also really wants our sad. Everything is not fine, and God wants to hear about it. He is drawn to us when we’re mourning and blesses us in a special way. God is not up there minimizing our pain and comparing it to others who have it worse than we do. God wants all pain to be surrendered to Him, and He has the capacity to respond to it all with infinite compassion.”
Gradually I began to speak some fledgling prayers: Lord help me to love my neighborhood, please help my kids to feel at home, help me to not be a snob about the vinyl-sided houses. I’m not joking about that last one.
I can tell you that God did respond with “infinite compassion” and, in the way He often shows His love to me, with some hilarity.
I think the changes started with the neighbors that I began to chat with and who helped me learn that a lot of life happens inside vinyl-sided houses. Across the street, a lovely retired couple greet me with a hearty wave. The husband gets up early to take birdseed outside in a tin foil pan to feed his two crow friends. The old Italian lady kitty-corner to us went rummaging in her garden shed to give me flower seeds when I commented on her beautiful cosmos flowers. This summer I had beautiful cosmos flowers. My garden also bloomed with crocosmia that Dee from around the corner set aside for me when she found out I love them.
There are often younger parents walking their little guys up the road to visit the neighborhood goats and mini pony who come to the fence for grass and veggies. A lovely older gentleman who I have chatted with on several occasions also makes the daily pilgrimage up the road to say hi to the goats and feed them some of his compost.
Of course, not everything is flowers and ponies. There is also a lady in the neighborhood who you would do well to avoid. She routinely walks her vicious pack of papillon dogs around the neighborhood: three on leashes and at least one in a doggie stroller. I affectionately refer to her brood as The Demon Spawn. If you are walking by them, with or without a dog, The Demon Spawn will go rabid; barking as ferociously as two-pound dogs can muster and pulling desperately at their leashes. The funniest part of the whole ordeal is the fact that the owner, a little old lady with long white braids, a sequined cap, and funky leggings, will be scowling just as ferociously at you. Not at her dogs. At you, for upsetting them.
Yes, I started to see the character and vitality in my neighborhood. But I also began to see the strength of my kids and the faithful way in which God was also providing for them. As I became more honest with the Lord, it gave my kids space to be more honest about their struggles. We were able to work through some of the challenges and make some changes that would soften the transition.
It has been very important for me to get comfortable with the uncomfortable and acknowledge that there are certain things you just can’t fast-forward or skip, no matter how upbeat you fancy yourself. Things like the first week of a new job, the stomach flu, or, as it so happens, moving. You have to walk through those things eyes wide open, fully processing and accepting that it is going to also require a level of patience as you wait to get to the other side.
I concede, moving is not in the same universe as some of the big griefs like death, divorce, or chronic illness. But learning to be honest with the Lord and understanding lament in the smaller challenges can prepare us for the heavier stuff. Esther Fleece Allen quotes D.A. Carson in her beautiful book: “There is no attempt in Scripture to whitewash the anguish of God’s people when they undergo suffering. They argue with God, they complain to God, they weep before God. Theirs is not a faith that leads to dry-eyed stoicism, but to a faith so robust it wrestles with God.” At the end of the day that is what we are going for; a robust and sturdy faith borne out of wrestling and struggle that carves us into the likeness of Christ and, even more precious, a closer knowing of Him.
In closing, I will share that, after four years of trying, the owner of The Demon Spawn recently returned my smile for the first time. It may not be five years yet, but the neighborhood is definitely feeling like mine. And I love it.
