Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong (25 page)

By Saturday night we were reminding each other that the trip had been good and worth it even if we didn’t find anywhere to live. We’d gotten more familiar with Birmingham, we’d honed in on a few areas we really liked, and we’d grown very attached to the rolling hills and cooler temperatures. There’s a quote by Philip Yancey that says faith is “trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse,” and that perfectly captures how we felt that weekend. We didn’t know why, and we didn’t know how, but somehow a city that we’d rarely visited and had never lived in had impressed itself on our hearts, and all we knew to do was trust that the Lord was behind it. It was probably the first time in my life I’d been that certain about something I had no logical reason to know.

The next morning we decided to go to breakfast and then drive down a stretch of road that I’d traveled a few times with Chox and Joe when I was younger. Some dear friends of theirs had moved to Birmingham when I was in high school, and sometimes we’d stop by their house when we were on the way to see Sister and Barry for a weekend. The houses in their neighborhood were a little north of our budget, but I remembered it as having lots of pine trees and crape myrtles and mimosas, all of which reminded me of my hometown.

A strong sense of familiarity came over me as we passed by buildings and shopping centers I hadn’t seen in more than ten years. I absentmindedly flipped through a new-homes magazine that our Realtor had sent us a couple
of weeks before, and when I spotted a subdivision that looked to be off that same road, just a little farther down, I showed the picture to David and said, “We have plenty of time before we leave
 
—wanna go check it out?”

He did, so we kept driving.

I’ve often wondered if our reaction to that drive would’ve been the same if the morning hadn’t been so picturesque, but the air was cool, the sky was blue, and as the suburbs gradually shifted into wide-open countryside, the scenery took our breath away. We drove up a mountain, back down it, then turned and wove through some of the prettiest rural roads that you ever did see. Dogwood and azalea blooms practically formed a tunnel leading out to the subdivision, and by the time we parked in front of one of the houses we wanted to see, I think both of us knew that we’d found our place.

We’d never even considered the possibility of living out in the country. But I’ll be doggone if the country didn’t win us over on that drop-dead gorgeous Alabama morning.

A couple of hours later, we drove across town to an open house our Realtor was hosting and told her we wanted to put in a bid on a house in the Far Away Subdivision.

“How in the world did you find a house all the way out there?” she asked.

David grinned at me, then at her, and shrugged his shoulders. “We just kept driving, I reckon.”

Adjusting to life in Birmingham (or in our case, right outside it) was as effortless as anything I’ve ever done. I still missed Mississippi, mind you. But we were so much closer. And the Lord showed us over and over that He had made a way for us, from our little house in the country to our sweet neighbors (two of whom moved here from Baton Rouge not long after we did) to my job as an English teacher (did you hear me? I said ENGLISH TEACHER) at a wonderful Christian school. And get a load of this: on my first day of summer workshops, I realized that I’d driven countless times by the church that had started the school; it was just off the interstate that I knew by heart from the summer I’d worked with Sister and Paige as I traveled back and forth from Myrtlewood to Atlanta.

Isn’t that just something else? I’d traveled the road to the church for twelve years before I ever got there. And that’s to say nothing of the Alabama barbecue that the Lord saw fit to bless us with in our new hometown.

But let me tell you something else I realized after that first day of workshops: I had a whole lot of catching up to do in the area of biblical scholarship. And if some of your eyes bugged out when you read that because you were expecting that I was going to make some smart-aleck remark like “capri pants wardrobe” or “contemporary Christian music collection,” oh no. I am so serious about the biblical scholarship remark. It was evident right away. My new school placed a strong emphasis on biblical integration in each subject area, so when a teacher talked about, say, what she had planned for her calculus class that year, a casual conversation might morph into a discussion about the consistency and order of God. That was usually the point when I’d think to myself,
Sister, I believe it’s time to up your theological game.

Let me put it this way: I was working in an environment where I’d overhear someone telling a joke with the words
continuationist
and
cessationist
in the punch line
 
—AND PEOPLE WOULD LAUGH. As someone who had never hung out in a lot of Bible studies or learned Hebrew or attended seminary or earned a PhD, I was astounded. So it was no wonder when, one morning when I overheard a lively discussion about dispensationalism in the teachers’ lounge, I had two reactions: (1) what in tarnation is dispensationalism? and (2) should I ever find myself in some adult version of Bible Drill, this crew right here will be my RIDE OR DIE.

There’s a verse in Psalms that says, “The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple” (119:130). And if there’s any one piece of Scripture that sums up those first couple of years of teaching in Birmingham, I would say, YES. THAT. BRING IT, PSALM 119. I was surrounded by so many gifted Bible teachers at my school that I sometimes felt like I was taking in information faster than I could process it, but the great advantage was that I started to see and understand things in Scripture that I’d never noticed before. I’d always thought of the Bible as a series of stories, but I started to see how those stories were connected. The words
that had been so mysterious for so long began to unfold before me
 
—a person who most definitely qualified as theologically “simple”
 
—and those words illuminated
everything
.

As you might suspect, this was a bit of a game changer.

In Baton Rouge, David and I had been members of a sweet church that felt very much like the church where we’d grown up (with the exception of a good bit more liturgy and the prevalent use of the phrase, “Lard, hear our prayer”). It was perfect for us at that point in our lives; it was the first church either of us had chosen as adults, and the familiarity of it helped us ease our way into the congregation. We weren’t overly involved, but there was a sense of belonging that comforted both of us, I think.

By the time we moved to Birmingham, church had become a nonnegotiable for us, so we began looking for one our very first weekend here. However, since our house was so far out in the country, we were constantly confronted with the realization that no matter what church we chose, we were probably going to have significant travel time each way. We spent several months visiting this church and that one, always trying to decide if it was a place where we’d want to drive forty minutes for Family Night Supper. I was frustrated by our inability to settle down, and even when we eventually joined a little church that was about a half hour from the house, I knew deep down that we lived too far away for it to work.

We continued in our state of church limbo for the next eight or nine months, but fortunately I had the benefit of great teaching and worship at school to sustain me. David, however, felt like he was dying on the vine, so when a neighbor asked if we might want to visit a Baptist church that was about fifteen minutes from our house, David practically screamed, “OKAY!” and then asked what time to be there. Joining a Baptist church was nowhere
 
—NOWHERE
 
—on our radar; keep in mind that we both come from sturdy Methodist/Episcopalian stock, and the Baptist church was mostly a mystery to us. I’d loved my Baptist school in Baton Rouge, but it turned out that a significant number of the folks who worked there were nondenominational, Presbyterian, or Catholic, so I wasn’t exactly reading
The Baptist Faith and Message
while I hung out in the teachers’ lounge.

So one gray, December Sunday, David and I woke up and got dressed
and made it to that Baptist church in time for the nine o’clock service. We walked into the sanctuary just as the music started, and while I had grown very accustomed to praise-and-worship music at my two Christian schools, it was a whole new worship day for David Hudson. There was a soloist at the piano with a full choir behind him, and if I could pick only two words to describe the experience, I’d have to go with
loud
and
lively
.

We found some seats in the back (of course), and while I was instantly captivated by the music, David appeared to be mildly horrified. We stood through two more songs, and when the pastor moved to the front of the sanctuary, I knew that there was about to be some preachin’.

Not preaching. That would be a much more formal affair.

What we had in store was some PREACHIN’.

And sweet mercy. Did we ever.

I had often heard older family members talk about pastors who could “preach the stars down,” but that was one of the few times I’d seen it live and in person. There was strong biblical content, there was practical application, and there was compelling communication. It would have been impossible not to listen. When the sermon was over, we sang a (lively) modern version of an old hymn, and as we left the sanctuary and walked back to the car, I kept glancing over at David to try to get a read on his reaction.

Once we sat down in the car, David actually spoke up first.

“Well, what did you think?” he asked.

“LOVED IT,” I replied.

He didn’t say anything for a few seconds, so I broke the silence.

“What did
you
think?” I asked. And then I held my breath.

“Well,” he answered as he turned the car onto the main road, “I’ll say this: at least they didn’t haul out the snakes.”

So it was a thumbs-down for him.

By the end of our second summer in Birmingham, David and I had been married for five years. We still had issues that we were working through, but I’d finally gotten to a place where I could accept that
we always will
. It took me a long time to realize that if there was tension or an argument or maybe
even some simmering resentment, that didn’t mean that we weren’t meant to be together or that we weren’t compatible or that OUR MARRIAGE WAS OVER, THE END.

It just meant that we were human. And sinners. And the Lord was using our marriage to sharpen us, to refine us, and oh have mercy, to sanctify us. He was also using our marriage to help us grow in grace, in love, and in trust.

The truth of the matter, I reckon, is that marriage sometimes feels a little bit like a soap opera. You love, you argue, you reconcile, you storm out of the room, you cry, you slam doors, you hurt, you heal, you laugh, and you pray with everything in you that there’s no evil twin lurking around the corner.

So what David and I found
 
—as I imagine lots of folks have
 
—was that no matter what happened in our personal soap opera (which, Lord have mercy, we would not broadcast on any network, ever, because I really don’t think it would be edifying or encouraging for anyone to see me have a breakdown over the color of my kitchen walls, much less watch us stand in stunned silence when one of us backed a car out of the garage but, unfortunately, forgot to close the driver’s-side door), we navigated the twists and turns and cliff-hangers a whole lot better when we were walking the road of faith together. If we were learning and growing together
 
—if we could sit in church on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights and know that, ultimately, we were about and after The Same Thing
 
—all the distractions and drama of the day-to-day seemed a whole lot less important.