so there's this "bible conference" that our church holds every year in a little town in north carolina at a conference/retreat center called lake junaluska. there are daily meetings for adults and children. actually, the children's programs are really the highlight. and everyone rents houses around this massive lake, and you just hang out with family and friends. we have often gone country line dancing in this old barn named "The Stompin' Ground." staying up late and talking, laughing. grabbing dessert at the local shoneys. the lake has this footpath encircling it, and i love walking that trail in the mornings and evenings. it's set in the mountains as well, and i just savor the feeling that invades me upon entering the small town.

my family, and all of my friends' families used to go every year growing up. i have begun many lasting friendships at this place. it was also the place where my parents took me the week after brock's death, and i just wandered the side streets up the mountains and around the lake. there is a definitive sense of peace that accompanies lake junaluska.

but this year we're not there, and not going up for the weekend. it's too bad really, b/c i usually mark the end of summer upon returning from bible conference. and now this created timeline will be off-kilter.

it's like the last bit of peace before the rush of autumn.

so that got me thinking about spaces in our lives. i think there are places of our past that invoke a sense of longing. a camp i grew up at is another space like that for me. the memories that these places hold saturate the space. and i think these two locations in particular create that sense of times past b/c of the ways i encountered God at these two places.

camp was one of growing~learning how to have friendships, relationships. learning how to love. learning what it meant to just BE with other people.

lake junaluska was learning how to walk after tragedy strikes. learning how to listen to God--b/c i couldn't think of anything else. learning how to begin a journey, not knowing when or how it would end.

i think the spaces in our lives evoke so much history in our own individual stories.

maybe not attending this year as i have done in the past is really a continual evolvement of learning to let go.

"God began to speak to my sinking heart: Your journey lies along another path. You've got to let all that go now... I knew there was not arguing. I didn't even try to put up a fight. I've been known to plow through barriers in the past, but not now.. My grip has loosened in recent years, and I knew this was a call to loosen it even more." --Journey of Desire by John Elderedge

I have drifted down a ways along the shoreline,
I just watched these ropes give way
where they were tied.
I could have reached out quick when the ropes first
slipped, if I had tried,
but I was wondering where the wind was trying to take me
overnight, if I never did resist, and
what strange breezes make a sailor want to
let it come to this,
with lines untied, slipping through my fist.
It is downhill all the way to the ocean,
So of course the river wants to flow.
The river's been here longer,
It's older and stronger and knows where to go.

David Wilcox~Slipping Through My Fist

posted by Kelly @ 9:58:00 AM