Holy Spirit, Lead

This past weekend, I traveled to Seattle with my feistiest dog to visit friends who are family, spend time with the sea and the trees, and celebrate a good friend's wedding.

It was so lovely to have a little respite from the routines of everyday life and return to a place I never had personal aspirations of living in, but one which has now become a second home. A place I never would have chosen to move to as an item on a bucket list became an essential part of my story, as a result of following the leading of the Spirit.

In 2016, when the Holy Spirit first began to intuit that the Pacific Northwest could be part of my story, she did so in prophetic images, then words which met my spirit. I remember walking along the bay in Redwood City, looking East over the water, and thinking, "Due North." All along that journey to attending seminary and moving to Seattle, the Holy Spirit spoke so clearly, so intentionally and obviously, that I had no intention of resisting the flow. Seattle would be a nearly four year period in a journey which would yield so much fruit, growth, and blooming, that my story, friendships, and relationship with God would be forever changed.

When I return to the Emerald City now, as Waffles and I did on this most recent trip, it is to spend time and share laughs and sun beams with friends who have walked with me through one of life's darkest valleys, as well as celebrated at some of its highest peaks. I stay with friends who have become chosen family. I return to revisit and to remember forests and walks I've taken with God under evergreen trees and remember the contending prayers, the seeds sown in tears and grit and faith. I tread those paths again. I return to gape at soaring mountains, to gaze in awe at their peaks and the bald eagles soaring the skies between. I bathe and baptize myself in waters which hold a knowing of the indigenous Duwamish, whose wisdom of the land far exceeds my limited understanding of the place. I return to celebrate the present moment of life and love and friendship and progress in one area or another, amongst one of us or another.

See, Seattle would become the place for me, where, yes, I would attend grad school and earn a degree in Theology and learn I could burn the candle at both ends; to be in school full-time and working part-time, even while hanging onto some New York hipster energy via Thursday night art walks and creative adventures. But mostly, Seattle would become the place where I would learn to enter into [and eventually, embody] vulnerability in community...under the setting of a moody, Pacific Northwest campground.

It's the place where I learned friends can come close and pass hope around, from one to the other, when hope is too heavy to carry oneself. It's the place where I gave myself permission to bloom, accepting that I get to be big because Creator's wilderness is HUGE, to take up the space I too am allowed to occupy in this world, as one of God's kids. Its a place where fragrant pho and savory sundubu jigae and delicious, cold poke readily await a hungry palate.

Seattle is a path I never would have taken without the Holy Spirit's leading, and yet that place sowed a new foundation with God on which I can stand, kick, or beat against, given the season. It revealed community which is strong enough to hold onto one other when we're broken and invites each of us into celebration when breakthrough happens for others; its a place where God meets people right at the apex of beauty, wilderness, and discovery.

Seattle is the place which taught me to always "say yes" when---and where--- the Spirit leads.

So I return, to remember, and to say "yes" again.

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law." Galatians 5:22-23