The overlap

I sat around a table of friends as the clock measured out time and told a story that came out too long and and ended with a sigh. I knew they were my friends because they listened, with rapt attention, to the entire thing though the food got cold in front of us. It was the first story I had told since I've been out of Lhasa.

I got lost driving around on a too warm Sunday morning and walked into a tiny room filled with sparsely populated pews with just enough time to marvel at the attention the people sitting there paid to my dimples before I took a seat, trying to catch my breath, up near the front. I told them a story too, a story about a Spirit like the wind and how He's blown around for three years and I couldn't tell them where He came from or where He's going but the story was too long and I ended with a heart that was full. Afterwards I was led by the arm to a plate heaping with wonderful things I'd almost forgotten like butter beans and cornbread and chicken salad and was amazed at that all of these strangers had entered so overwhelmingly into my life and made room there as the dearest of friends. We are given so many things we don't deserve.

I pulled together a few strands of time out of nowhere one precious morning and sat on the bed and dialed phone numbers into the computer. Voices that were as familiar to me as breathing echoed out of the screen and I took deep breaths desperate to memorize every syllable that came out. I can hear you like you are next to me! You must take care of your body. I am same old. Kelly teacher I asked all the foreigners if they knew you. It is so surprise to hear you! Today is my happy day! I am wait for you. You must come back quickly.... so the melody of another life played on in the room of this life now quite different. When time, that rascally thief, ran out... only pinpricks were left in my soul.

I walked across a university campus I had once known and am now slightly shocked and disgusted by into a dining hall to appear before a cashier whose care for all who come in resounds with the deep care of a Shepherd for His flock. In a moment of tenderness and tears I was caught up in a hug that numbed me by the resemblance to another tearful embrace from another cashier in another land now far away. This dear woman gushed with praise to our Father on my behalf, and moved me with the totally undeserved depth of her joy. She introduced me to everyone in sight, demanded that I be given anything I wanted from now until eternity and the phantoms of free vegetables and calloused hands scratched achingly close to a place I hadn't let myself return to yet.

Later I found myself around a table with a Mexican girl whose heart mirrors my own and a Kenyan girl who I discovered was actually a long lost friend telling them a story that brought me to and kept me in the land of darkness for three often long though now seemingly short years. It was too long, as all my stories are these days, and ended with a flicker of hope amidst a burning flame of trust fulfilled. When I later revealed that I was only to stay one semester at this university the girl from Kenya's face suddenly transformed into all the faces of all the people I had to leave behind in Lhasa. Grief looks startlingly familiar, and I begged her not to take me back to what I had just left so soon.

The overlap of the life I had and the one I now live is messy, often painful, and precious to me. Memories like so many transparent pictures fall on top of and into each other. Everything looks like everything else and what I have never seen before. I am caught up in a tearing sensation of going forward too quickly and going backward too suddenly and I know that at some point I need to take some steps in the reverse in order to move ahead. I am sure that moving on means rummaging through all the boxes of memories and experiences that I never sent, unpacking all the things that I never really packed to begin with but instead left scattered all over the land somewhere at 13,000 feet. I'm going to have to pour out the cups of tea I left cooling up there on the rooftop of the world, and wash them, in order for them to be filled with everything that this next moment might hold.

Soul, do not be taunted by that old gypsy man Time, be still and soak up the overlap.