Midnight Confessions

In the fall of 1970 I was seventeen and a half years old when I left my childhood home in Tower Lakes to study Russian at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. 

From that time throughout my whole adult life, the longest I have resided in any one house or apartment has been around two years, except for the four years I dwelled in a student apartment on the Wesley Theological Seminary (WTS) campus in Washington, D.C.

I was just thinking about that because I seem to be on the verge of a transition again.

My life also changed when I felt led to leave the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church at the end of July, 1999.

Sometimes we know exactly when our lives will change, and we have plenty of time to prepare for new chapters in the stories of our lives here on Earth. On the other hand, our lives can change no-notice in so many different ways.

The opening sentence in Count Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" can be translated, "All happy families are happy in similar ways, but unhappy families may be miserable in a great many ways.". From that opening remark, of course, Tolstoy has written about 650 pages to prove his point (in the English version).

I thought I started out reflecting on the transition that is on-going in my life, but maybe that's not all I have to say this morning. We'll see.

Wesley Seminary's campus in D.C. sits on a little postage stamp corner of The American University which was founded by the Methodist Church. In the late 1950's the Methodist Bishop of the Washington/Maryland region was instrumental in moving a Methodist seminary from Westminster, Maryland, to the District of Columbia, and the people in charge somehow persuaded the powers-that-were at AU to part with that small but choice piece of real estate near the northwest corner of D.C.

I really loved living there. Besides the convenience of only having to walk across the parking lot to get to class, go to worship, sing in the choir, have a meal, visit with friends, or go to the library, I had easy access to our whole, very beautiful capital city, and to friends, shopping, movies, restaurants and other opportunities in Virginia, Maryland and all around that part of the East Coast.

If we left after rush hour, about 7pm on a Friday evening, we could even drive to Manhattan in about five hours.

The first time some friends and I motored up there, I only had been to NYC once before, when my kids were very little, for a family wedding.

We approached the Big Apple from Brooklyn, so all my memories of movies shot in New York, and memories of photos of the metropolis still did not really prepare me for the way the millions of lights of "the city that never sleeps" shimmered and glowed in a lively way, framed by the arches, cables and spans of the Brooklyn Bridge. The view that included the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center was a complete surprise to me because I watch a lot of classic movies, and of course, in them the Twin Towers were not part of the city's skyline.

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Looks like I will need to finish this later today. Has been a restless night because the edge of the effects of the upper respiratory virus have been confounded by the effects of the early spring pollen down here. The allergy meds and the cough medicine have just about succeeded in tipping me back over into the sand man's dominion.

God willing, I'll see you later, Beloved. Hope you had a good night's rest and that you will enjoy this Lenten Sunday in worship and fellowship, or however you spend your day.