Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong (21 page)

On the surface they didn’t seem to have much in common other than their Mississippi residency and the place of their employment, but when I dug a little deeper, I found some kindred spirits. No topic was off limits, so on any given night the conversation would run the gamut from peach cobbler to politics to the problems with standardized testing. For the most part, my coworkers were people of deep faith and strong personal conviction, and I loved watching how seamlessly they moved from work life to personal life to work life and back again. There was no separation between the two
 
—no personality that they kept tucked away for one or the other, and the wholeness of their lives was something I very much needed to see.

It was probably the first time in my life when I’d been mindful about looking for it.

I don’t know. I guess I was finally at a point when I relished the opportunity to soak up some wisdom, so those sweet people from Elliston High School were one of the Lord’s many gifts during my Jackson years.

No matter where we were or what we did, though, our unofficial host and master of ceremonies was Coach Johnston, whose slightly more rebellious personality came alive in a big group. He was loud, charming, and just a little bit salty, and I don’t think he ever met a crowd he didn’t like. Since Kim and I were almost always the youngest two faculty members at any social gathering, most of Coach Johnston’s stories were new to us, so we tended to sit at or near his table while he held court. Listening to him was like being in the front row of a Southern Gothic Festival, what with his tales of toothless fishermen, Mississippi Delta juke joints, and 1960s moonshine runs that always seemed to begin or end on gravel roads that ran alongside cotton fields.

And listen
 
—that was just the first fifteen minutes of any given Thursday night. That was the warm-up. By the time we’d leave the Iron Horse two or three hours later, Kim and I would have heard so many stories that we both could have sworn we’d been in the presence of one of Flannery O’Connor’s long-lost sons.

(I am certainly not implying that Flannery O’Connor actually had any long-lost sons.)

(I would be mortified if I started some sort of literary scandal.)

One Thursday night before play-offs
 
—sometime in November, I think
 
—Kim and I were walking to her car after supper at the Iron Horse when we heard Coach Johnston’s voice behind us:

“Hey! Y’all hold up! I just got off the phone with Gail.”

Gail was Coach Johnston’s wife of almost twenty-five years, and I knew from the first time I met her that the Lord had given her extra portions of patience, calm, and understanding. He seems to do that with coaches’ wives, especially in the South.

Kim and I stopped just as we were opening our car doors and waited for Coach to catch up to us.

“So, I just got off the phone with Gail, and I was telling her that I won’t sleep a wink tonight. I’m just nervous. I need to ride around. Y’all tired? Y’all want to go?”

Kim and I looked at each other, both of us wondering what to do. We didn’t exactly have a whole lot going on other than wanting to get home to watch TV, but I think we both wondered if going riding around with Coach Johnston was within the bounds of propriety. I mean, he was very much like an older brother to us, and we felt totally safe with him, but he was married, after all, and so was Kim, and . . .

He must have read our minds, because he looked at Kim, then at me, and then back at Kim, and he started to laugh. “Are y’all worried about Gail? Lord, have mercy. She ain’t gonna care! I’m old enough to be y’all’s daddy. Now come on, you two
 
—let’s go hit the roads of Elliston County.”

And then he grinned real big.

Kim and I agreed to go
 
—but not until we got the go-ahead from her husband. The three of us piled into Coach’s Jeep, and after he fired up a cigar, rolled down his window, and opened up his sunroof, he weaved through the streets of downtown Jackson until we reached the on-ramp to I-55. Coach turned north, drove five or six miles, then exited on a road that could have taken us all the way to Yazoo City if we’d had a mind to go.

I don’t remember what we talked about, what music we listened to, or
how long we were in that car. But I will never forget how that stretch of road spoke to me; it wound around and looped and curved in the direction of nowhere in particular, and then all of a sudden it was like the whole world opened up
 
—gorgeous, rolling hills on each side of us, wide-open Mississippi sky up above.

I didn’t have the foggiest idea how we’d gotten there.

But I was pretty certain that it was where I belonged.

And I couldn’t imagine why I’d ever want to leave.

My first year in Jackson flew by, and if there’s a big, overarching theme to those twelve months, it’s this: it was the happiest, most uncomplicated time.

So naturally that’s when David came back into the picture.

Stands to reason, right?

And when he came back into the picture, he fully intended to stay there.

Granted, our first attempt at dating was kind of a mess. But the second time around? It was just
easy
. We had a long talk beforehand, and David told me very clearly that, as far as he was concerned, that was it. The intention was not to hang out on weekends and take some road trips and see where everything led. The intention was that, barring something completely unexpected, we would get married.

Well. All righty then. And also: FINE BY ME.

We were both twenty-six
 
—plenty old enough to know that we loved each other and missed each other in the least dramatic way possible. By that point I’d learned that my heart could certainly go on without him (thank you, Celine Dion, for expressing that thought through song), but I also knew that my heart was never more at home than when we were together. Dating seemed like a really good plan.

Six months later he proposed, and my reaction wasn’t anything like I thought it would be. I didn’t feel faint. I didn’t feel like some giddy princess who had finally found her prince. I did, however, feel deeply, profoundly
honored
. That was the sweetest surprise.

And five months after that
 
—a week after I wrapped up my second
year in the town that I’d never wanted to leave
 
—we said our vows at the front of the church where we’d laughed pretty much nonstop throughout elementary, junior high, and high school.

We’d come a long way since then.

I wasn’t even wearing high-top Reeboks anymore.

Our wedding reception was at the home of some family friends, and since all the moisture in the entire world had collected over Myrtlewood early that morning and poured from the clouds as if God Himself were dumping buckets of water over central Mississippi, the post-wedding festivities turned out to be more of an indoor affair than an outdoor one. David and I hadn’t planned on having a receiving line or anything like that, but it was so crowded inside that we ended up standing in a little parlor so we could talk to people and stay out of the fray a little bit. Within just a few minutes, though, a line started to form, and for the next hour and a half, we hugged what seemed like everyone we’d ever known.

It may have been my favorite part of the whole day. I’m not one to be overly sentimental, but let’s face it: people are awesome.

We were getting close to the last person when I saw Coach Johnston at the back of the line. Naturally we’d invited him to the wedding
 
—he’d been a big part of my life in Jackson, and heaven knows he’d kept me entertained for two football seasons’ worth of Thursday nights
 
—but it never dawned on me that he would drive over for the ceremony, much less stay for the reception.

It seems to me that every wedding has an emotional tipping point
 
—a particular moment when, for whatever reason, all the big feelings just spill over and pour out. And I am here to tell you that when I caught a glimpse of Coach Ben Johnston as he poked his head around the corner of that little parlor where David and I were standing, that was it for me. I started to cry so hard I wondered if I’d ever stop. I finally had to put my head in my hands and surrender to full-on blubbering mode. David, who was as taken aback by my reaction as I was, wrapped his arm around my shoulders and asked me to tell him what was wrong.

I couldn’t say a word, though. I just cried.

When Coach Johnston finally got close enough to hug my neck, I left a trail of mascara all over his jacket (I believe the expression you’re looking for is “subdued elegance”). He was, to say the least, surprised by such an emotional greeting, and he patted me sort of awkwardly on the shoulder as he shook David’s hand.

“Hey. We’re gonna miss this girl,” he said. “But I sure am happy for y’all.”

I don’t think I ever formed a sentence. I did, however, hiccup with a frightening degree of regularity.

And while I’m sometimes confounded by my reactions, I knew
exactly
why the sight of Coach Johnston affected me like it did.

Somewhere in my early twenties I’d fallen into the trap of thinking that if there was ever going to be a long-term rekindling of my faith, the flame would arrive in the most melodramatic way possible. I’d pictured a long walk down the center aisle of a church, probably at the end of a revival when conviction had just worn me down and worn me out over the course of three or four nights. Maybe I’d find myself in the center of a prayer circle, surrounded by loving friends and family members who would urge me to turn from my doubt and trust the Lord more. Or maybe Emma Kate would drag out all those old Scripture index cards from her college bulletin board, and the fresh realization of all the ways I’d most certainly disappointed Jesus would open the floodgates of repentance and sorrow.

Turns out I was wrong.

The issue in the first half of my twenties wasn’t that I didn’t know the Lord. The issue wasn’t that He had forsaken me. The issue was this: I began a relationship with Jesus in an environment where faith was super easy. I didn’t have to go deep in my relationship with Him because superficial worked just fine in my safe little life with my safe little family and my safe little church and my safe little friends. But when I went to college, that safe little faith was no match for the big, real world. I had the benefit of good friends to keep any major rebellion at bay, but anything that looked like obedience in my life was mostly just good behavior. It was almost like, when I was eighteen or nineteen, someone pressed a pause button on
my faith, and the process of growing in maturity as a believer came to a screeching halt.

But finally, when I was twenty-six, that pause button got pressed again, and I can tell you even now exactly who was responsible (well, in addition to, you know, the Lord): a big ole assortment of folks who lived in and around Jackson, Mississippi
 
—and who had the courage to live real life right in front of me. They weren’t accountability partners or mentors or counselors, though certainly all those are valuable. They’d never asked me to sit before them and recount every mistake I’d ever made. They didn’t try to implement a five-step discipleship strategy for my personal sanctification.

But they dropped by my apartment with their babies, and they invited me to the Iron Horse, and they stopped by my classroom after school just to see what was going on. I’d met some of them in college, I’d met some of them at work, and I’d even met one of them in the crib (that would be Kim). They were my friends. Plain and simple. And there was something about their unconditional acceptance that met me right in the dead center of my need. I doubt that any of them knew how much they were ministering to me, but they opened up their homes and their arms and their hearts at a time when what I needed more than anything else was to see real life integrated with real faith
 
—in all of its messy wonderfulness.

And oh, did they ever show me. Even when they had no idea.

So when I saw Coach Johnston at my wedding, I didn’t cry because I was sad. I cried because I was so stinkin’ grateful. Just seeing his face reminded me how those two years in Jackson had been pure grace in my life.
Pure grace.
That didn’t mean that I stopped making mistakes
 
—but it did mean I started learning from them. Slowly but surely I started to realize that a return to faith doesn’t have to be melodramatic, and it doesn’t have to happen overnight. For me, as simple as it sounds, it was just a series of really small turns in the right direction. It was so gradual, in fact, that I’d barely even realized it was happening
 
—until one day I discovered that instead of feeling drawn to the darkness, I much preferred to walk in the Light.