There Are Many Rooms

Church Hopping and Car Camping

I've experienced responsibility much as Jonathan Button experienced age: rather opposite of most people, with an awfully lot at a young age and quite a bit less of it the older I've gotten. I'm turning into quite the gypsy, keeping my conservative appearances mostly because I like it. Some, mostly staunch conservative Christians have an issue with this. Why, I wonder, when it is they who sing old hymns such as Wayfaring Stranger and keep a copy of The Pilgrim's Progress next to their Bible. 

They chide me on my wild ways, "You must have a home church." 

But this world is not my home. I am not meant to sit still, or to wait at home for the coming of some man or of the Messiah. We are all meant to be as children: wild and loud and happy. I should be able to pick my own flowers, thank you very much, without being accused of feminism. 

I sometimes find churches to attend while traveling. Looking back on them I feel as if I experienced the same sort of Deja vu of having been there before, or the place being a room of an old home. 

"There are many rooms in my Father's house." 

I've visited three rooms these last couple months. A sort of Mennonite church in Virgina, a Polish Catholic service in New York, and an old order Russian ex-Mennonite church in Canada. I'd never been to a service like any of them, and yet they were familiar. 

The first was right, just like the porcelain dolls on my bookshelf are right. To some it might be weird. I am reminded of my favorite childhood Pentecostal church. The stained-glass in the second church depicted early church history: ships, fish, swords. Afterwards the priest talked with us, making us laugh for a moment before he had to "go watch my team lose to France!" 

I pretty much disagreed with everything that was said at the third church, but the novel I've been dreaming of writing since I was fourteen poured onto me and the entire plot and all the bits of "why" and "how" came to me through a sudden burst of inspiration I hadn't felt in years. All the fear I'd felt before when I thought of writing the novel, I've always known I ought to write left me. I began writing a mystical Christian novel today, the story born of a nine-year old's controversial prayer, a fourteen-year old's imaginations, and a twenty-six-year old's ruffled feathers in a Russian anabaptist service. 

After the service this petite old woman went around with a pint sized Ziplock bag full of chocolate squares for all the girls. Those who accidently had their backs turned to her were told, "Honey, come here, I have something sweet for you." 

Everyone asked everyone before they left, "Do you have someplace to go for lunch?" 

I saw a woman a little younger than me all in black and wearing metal-rimmed glasses, her frizzy hair let down and flying out from under her head covering. A long skirt flared out from her classy knee-length coat, and she wore finger-less mittens. She looked wild and nerdy and comfortably pretty, and I wondered how her spirit wasn't quenched yet. We talked and her voice matched her persona. 

A fog has lifted. I wonder if maybe all the good things come to us when we are young and being an adult is about working out those dreams. Sometimes that's scary: what if I don't have more things to think and write and do? But then I remember I have quite enough as it is. 

How wonderful it is to be writing as much as I have been writing these last few months, and to feel this wonderful burst of inspiration. How amazing it is to continually find myself discovering home and all its nooks and crannies... how large and warm and beautiful everything can be. What a blessing it is to be free. And what a gift it is to dream.