(I apologize for my recent absence...if you'll read this, you'll see it's due to a 4 month semester abroad in Europe.)

I woke to a world wet with the tears of another spring. Another new beginning; this old, familiar place where the world never fails to come alive again…the spring I’ve known for 21 years, and yet she’s still a stranger, still new, still unknown. Somehow I forget every time what it looks like, alive, and it always surprises me. Why? Perhaps because her face changes, as the trees grow, or die and fall. Perhaps because the weather never escorts her exactly the same way twice. And yet…I begin to think perhaps the difference is mostly in me. Perhaps I meet her with new eyes. Perhaps I carry with me what I didn’t have, what I didn’t know before.

     A week and a half ago I came home from a four-month semester abroad in Austria. The semester itself was the experience of a lifetime, but the homecoming has been equally rich—because it’s been telling me about the journey and about the end. A little like waking to springtime, coming home. Four months is a long time to be gone. And yet I slip right through the door into this old familiar life—I find it at once old and new—and it picks me right up again, carrying me along in its steady current. Nothing really changed. New countertops in the kitchen, a new puppy…but nothing really changed.

     Except me.

     Four months in Europe demands that you change. The experience is just too big to fit into the old self. You have to grow if you’re going to receive it.

     I remember when I was too little to reach the bathroom faucet, and the kitchen counter was just about at eye level. Everything looked different then. But I grew up so gradually that I didn’t really notice, and it doesn’t usually strike me that the kitchen looks any different now than it ever did. It takes something like leaving and coming back to be reminded of what we know so well, of what we’ve always known.

     I begin to see that life itself is a lot like coming back, over and over again, to the same rooms. The rooms themselves don’t really change. But we do. So it can be familiar, but it’s never quite the same. And sometimes it can look like we’re getting nowhere—we forget when we couldn’t see over the countertop. But the point was never how far we got anyway, but how much we’ve become who we’re meant to be.

     Last semester during my travels I climbed the duomo of the cathedral in Florence, as well as the cupola of St. Peter’s basilica in Rome. The view from the top of both was breathtaking and I’ll never forget it, but I think I learned something about life just from the climb. First of all, you have to go slowly on the way up, and be patient with yourself and your progress, if you’re ever going to make it to the top. Secondly, you really have to stop and look out the windows when they come by; the tiny snapshot view hints at what’s waiting for you and keeps you going, and the closer you get to the top the more exciting it is. A lot of times the stairway up can be dark and cold, or close and muggy, more dirty than clean, crowded even, and not exactly enjoyable. But it’s the only way to the top. And (as the windows remind you) in light of where it’s taking you, it suddenly becomes so beautiful…

     Like a spiral staircase, winding slowly upward, life has us continually circling back around to where we’ve been—but, whether we can tell or not, each time we come back around we’re a little higher up, we can see a little father, we’re a little closer to where we’re going. Life is a pilgrimage—something I realize now in a new, deep way after my pilgrimage in Europe. Life is a slow, slow, steady sequence of experiences, at once old and new, which come together slowly to make us who we’re becoming. Each familiar old room is a new gift, each routine sunrise an irreplaceable part of our journey to the end of things. At the end, let’s not look back only to realize that we missed the gift that was the journey.