Yesterday and today it began to hit me. Driving around the streets of Los Angeles (many of them familiar) I found myself thinking of Wheaton, Illinois. I didn’t have much space to think about it on the trip out here. Being on the road and sleeping in a different place each night, its hard for thoughts to settle and gather. Now that I’ve been here a few days, the reality is sinking in that my environment will be different. I will not live the way I once did. New beginnings can be good. This one is good. But it involves a loss and, until recently, the contours and shape of that loss had not come into focus for me.

It is not being able to see the green grass of fields and parks and the Prairie Path. It is not being able to look forward to church in the big building with familiar faces, sounds, smells. It is missing out on the possibility of Saturday nights out with good friends. It is the Panera on Roosevelt. The names of expressways and tollways. Hugs and smiles from friends who had become like family, and those who were just starting to.

Even harder than the loss of things that were is the loss of things that might have been.

I don’t want to dwell on it. It’s too sad, and I don’t want my writing to be a downer. Every change involves a loss. Every decision involves a loss, actually. A loss of one set of possibilities in favor of another. So many factors go into the decisions we make, but we have to find some way to live with them. We make them in faith, and with others, in the hope that they are what’s best for our growth, our families, or careers, our ministries, even our need for things like healing, community, restoration.

Right now, living in a state of limbo—here, but not yet living here; awaiting permanency—it is hard to see the things that set in motion the decisions that brought us here. Nothing has begun yet. And so, in search of stability and familiarity (and because I am a naturally nostalgic person), my mind attaches itself to memories. Those places and people in which my life felt so situated and stable. I think there was something about Wheaton—its churches, the friends I made there, the simplicity and plainness of it—that made things feel even more comforting and permanent than they actually were. Which I think is fine with me. If anything, it makes me appreciate that place even more.

I will write more about this in the coming days and weeks.