Linger

Thoughts seem to linger.

Memories of riding bikes and playing outside in the neighborhood.  Those glorious days of summer when everything was innocent.

Dark times when that innocence was shattered.  

That lingers on as well.

If I built a tapestry of all the days of my life, with each strand a moment.  With each section telling the story of me.  What would that look like?  Carol King wrote a song that describes something like this.  I'd like to think that my own personal tapestry would reflect more light than dark.

I see the days of summer.  Then I see the dark times even as a child when there was horror.

I find myself remembering more and more of the neighborhood I grew up in.  Short Street.  There were a ton  of boys running around playing, riding bikes and splashing down at the creek that ran down in the back of several of the houses.

The hard memories had so enveloped the good that I could barely remember the trampoline, the swing set I had in the front yard and the running free and riding in the wind throughout that neighborhood without a care.

What lingers now is a picture of a man looking back at a child who didn't understand what was going on.  And walking through those moments with tears and pain at the hurt that could have consumed me for a lifetime.  They almost did consume me.  It took a long time to process, hell, to even talk about those images.  But when you can separate yourself from the actual events, there is an ability to see it in a more or less clinical setting.  

There was a price paid.  And only in the last few years have I seen the lingering pain diminish.  And Hope take place of those damaging moments.

Now I can't help but think that there are more memories that have been clouded and covered by the dark moments of my life.  So when I think back, I am slowly being able to see the positive that may have been buried right along side of the hurts.

I don't want a life filled with regrets.  I can't help many of them from lingering.  But I also see that if I look deeper, there are some really triumphant moments that linger still.

Looking through the window into Dave Mitchell's drum studio and watching the 'coolest cat' ever play jazz... and I play Jazz still.  Pretty much the only performing I do anymore.

Sitting on the lawn at the world drum festival in Washington D.C. summer of my 10th grade year.  Getting lost in the rhythms and not wanting to leave.

My first true kiss on the campus of Clarke Central High School earlier that same school year.

8th grade Language Arts class, where the teacher actively encouraged me to write...poems, songs, words...just write!

My first guitar, which I bought with my own money my Junior year of high school.

The day I bought a little NIV bible from the local christian bookstore.  It was 1989 and though rugged and sometimes falling apart, I still carry it with me most every day.  It changed my life.  Made God more accessible to my questioning spirit.

The kids.

Hearing God's voice in the mountains.

Finding peace.  Slowly.  Day by day.