Any May a Beautiful Change

This post in honor of my friend Katharine’s new book, Any Day a Beautiful Change. It’s about the way life changes, knocks you around, and surprises you with some grace. Katharine’s big change was the collision of motherhood, marriage, and ministry, but even if you have no connection with any of those things, her writing is engaging and funny and her stories are moving, frank, and without cliché. It’s just a great book about real life – check it out.

In May, five years ago, my life changed. I met a really nice guy. A guy who made me reconsider applying for jobs at churches in far-flung cities. I withdrew some applications and limited my job search to the Chicago area (although Adam insisted, later, that if I’d gotten that chaplain job in Hawaii, he could’ve made it work). A few months later, The Church of St. Benedict, here in Bolingbrook, interviewed me, and called me to be their priest. Adam and I married less than a year later, and now we both live here.  Way, way out in the suburbs of Chicago.

My clergy friends serving in rural areas would laugh at me, because to them Bolingbrook may as well be in the Loop. But I’d always imagined myself living in more urban areas. I grew up in Chicago. I loved city streets, the diversity, the skyline, the sense of history… See, Bolingbrook was the kind of place I made fun of when I was in high school: subdivisions, parking lots, malls, cornfields, and a “historic district” dating to 1960.

It wasn’t the kind of place I’d expected to end up. Even in my interview with the church, someone asked, “What will it be like for a city girl like you to move to a place like this?” I wasn’t sure, but I loved the church congregation and I had a feeling something was waiting for me in this community. Even as I drove in for my first interview I noticed some things that I liked.

There were open spaces. Restored prairie, open fields, big yards, and lots of sky. It felt open to the sunshine and in touch with the prairie in a way Chicago didn’t.

A school was letting out as I drove by – and the kids were all different colors! What?!? This was not my image of the suburbs.  And actually, it was more integrated than most Chicago schools I know.

So, Bolingbrook intrigues me. My suburban life intrigues me. I live in a subdivision, I shop at big box stores, I can always find a parking place, my husband mows the lawn, and we drive everywhere. But I also grow vegetables in our backyard, we walk our dog through a park with a pond and a small river almost every day, we have a group at church devoted to addressing issues of race and diversity, and our neighbors are Filipino, Black, White, Korean, Muslim, Indian, and African.

In part, that’s why I write this blog, to continue to try to understand where I live and how our ideas of home and our reality are sometimes related and sometimes not. My “beautiful change” was to convert from urbanite to suburbanite and to feel a part of this place where I live and serve.