In January 2022, I started this newsletter. It was originally called “Where Soul Meets Body,” and something I used to process books I was reading (like these five), but also some of what I was learning about in counseling (like the feelings wheel). Along the way I wrote about how we got Albi, why I bought a Dodge Challenger, and what it’s like living in the cone of uncertainty. I pondered why change is hard, what it means to love your body, and thanks to a conversation with Andy Crouch, what a bicycle for the heart might mean. And, I think I can safely say, I’m the only person who composed theological reflections after their dog was neutered.
Parallel to this journey of self-discovery, I was in the process of applying and being accepted into the PhD program at Dallas Theological Seminary. On the one hand, this represented a new stage in my journey. On the other hand, it was a return and reconnection to a previous stage. We don’t often get to regularly revisit an earlier part of our life while still living in the present. Driving west to Dallas at 88 mph has been my own version of time travel, spread out across the last three plus years.
You could call it revisiting, but it’s also mean a process of reinterpreting. In order to better understand my present, I had to make better sense of my past. There were parts of myself left behind in Texas I needed to retrieve. And as I ventured farther west, I found there were parts even farther in the past that need retrieval.
Gathering and attending to the parts has been a process of reintegrating myself. And some things finally clicked into place over the course of my three road trips to Dallas last fall. I knew I was “Arriving Somewhere,” but I wasn’t quite sure where. I thought maybe if I kept driving, I’d eventually figure out where I was going.
I was right.
To tell you more, I’ll need more than a few consecutive installments. I’ll need the rest of the year. Because I have other writing commitments (remember the PhD program thing?), I’ll stick to a monthly update the last Monday of the month. Each month will be a new chapter in the story of what I hope is a coherent narrative. This was the introduction that buys me some time to get the first real chapter into your inbox by the end of February.
The first chapter starts with the road trip that gave birth to the idea of using the various road trips to tell a story. That trip, like much of life, didn’t turn out how I planned or expected. But to find out why, you’ll have to wait a few weeks.