Nashville Part Three
I sat on the balcony/breezeway of my hotel at a small café table set for two. The traffic pulsing through the veins and arteries of downtown Nashville on a Friday night hummed and screamed to my right. I sent Jeno a short video of the scene. He in turn sent me the views from our home on R3, bird song mixed with the occasional sound of engines traveling down R3. I have enjoyed learning the past two days, and tomorrow morning will be good as well, but I have reached the point where my anticipation faces homeward. I miss home.
This short trip reminds me of the panacean quality of travel for me, ever since I spent the summer in Alaska and possibly as early as my middle school trip to Colorado with Natasha. Through travel, I found new ways of connecting with the world and with myself. I recognize those years as the path leading to the outer edges of the labyrinth – moving in an erratically concentric path away from the center, eventually and methodically returning me to the heart of it.
After the debacle of Lex Brodie, my next temp job in Nashville landed me in the outpatient psychiatry clinic at Vanderbilt University. I served as secretary to a geriatric psychiatrist, and later, worked in the office of an OCD researcher. I loved my work with these physicians and the nurses, social workers, nurse practitioners and support staff in the clinics. I thought, even then, that IF I decided to go into medicine at some point, I could see myself enjoying psychiatry. Funny how random assignments from a temp agency influence the trajectory of a life – something too coincidental to be coincidence as I might say (like in a sermon posted earlier this week).
And my work with IVCF convinced me that I wanted to be in ministry full time which spurred me forward in my ordination process. The ordination process took me to New Jersey for another Master’s degree which in turn connected me to my boss in California where I worked with graduate students again (with an IVCF connection there as well). Then the hoops of ordination led to the Memphis move for a chaplaincy program, which brought me to Jeno and eventually hospice. Then hospice shaped the processing of my if-this-is-breast-cancer period which ended with me beginning the prerequisites for medical school. . .and I think many of you know the rest.
With each move, I returned slowly, though not deliberately, back home – back to the center where I began. Nothing I might have imagined, but exceedingly, abundantly more than I could have imagined. Grace, grace, everything truly is grace.
photo accessed from https://www.mapquest.com/us/tennessee/vanderbilt-child-and-adolescent-psychiatry-369582289