Thoughts on Looking Back

This past Thursday, Kelly and I packed up the family and made our first visit en-masse back to Richmond (hence the Friday blogger silence). I spoke at my former InterVarsity chapter at Virginia Commonwealth University, a place that I prayed over for nine years, and we spent a couple of whirlwind days seeing friends.

Growing up in a military family, we moved about every three years. And our general rule of frequent-moving-life: don't look back. As a sensitive little kid, I didn't really get this. We still liked those people, why didn't we ever go back to visit?

Having spent the last fourteen years with college students, I see now some of the wisdom of my family's operating system--freshmen who go home every weekend take much longer to settle into college. Those who make a little more of a clean break have a much better transition. "Clean break" is a favorite phrase of mine in many contexts--dating advice and transitioning to college being the top two.

So I was sure to pack my emotional thermometer as I made my first real voyage back to VCU after almost nine months away. And I was pleasantly surprised by a couple of things: 1. That I loved being with my former VCU kids and seeing old friends in Richmond who were significant to Kelly and me. and 2. That I was quite sure that our move to Chapel Hill was exactly where we should be.

Perhaps this clean-ness is more the result of my personality than anything else. I'm a high "J" on the Myers-Briggs test, meaning I'd prefer to make decisions and live with them than wallow forever in unending options and evaluation. But I think it also has much to do with a deeply settled sense that God has brought us to this new place, and our process to get here was very diligent and seemed to be pretty clear. It was also good that I intentionally waited until spring to go back for my first visit.

So perhaps looking back (maybe after making a clean break) isn't always such a bad thing, after all.