First blog post-move, one week after my last full entry. At the time of that writing, I was huddled in a four-foot-high sleeping loft while movers emptied our studio apartment and I struggled to keep breathing, the victim of unsettledness-induced panic.  Today, I write from a soft lounge chair in the lobby of my new apartment complex, a lobby equipped with complimentary wifi, coffee, and pool view.  I write this as the owner of a car and a Georgia drivers license.  I write this as the co-renter of a two-bedroom apartment with two massive bathrooms, a garden tub, and a kitchen island.

Other than that, things are pretty much the same.  Are you there, God?  It’s me, Stephanie.  Thanks for the venue change.

And the BF is pretty much the same.  I’ve watched him this week as he has navigated car dealerships and the DMV and various other mundane-duty-affiliated places, a smile on his face and his Leather Binder of Preparation under his arm.  He has planned and budgeted for every aspect of our life together, with me in tow and in possession of one one-thousandth of the patience and foresight he has in spades.  I have complained and nail-bitten my way through the dealerships and the DMV, longing to pull out one of the multiple books I’ve finished this week while the big boys talk numbers.  And now he stands in our apartment directing traffic in the form of movers and instructing me to go relax somewhere, knowing the iPhone he usually gives me, like a parent dangling a shiny rattle in front of a baby, is not a sufficient distraction for apartment upheaval.  Yeah, I got a keeper.

But anyone reading this already knows that, so it’s time for me to catch up on my reflections about leaving New York, my home for the past five years.  I’ve been longing for and dreading this moment for the past week.  I knew the emotion of a New York-less existence would hit me hard, and in the weeks leaving up to its reality I anticipated that emotion…but it never came.  We were too busy: reservations at our favorite restaurants, last trip to the wine bar, going-away dinners, book signing with a favorite author, party at the Boat Basin, walks in the park.  My anticipation of leaving the city was always distracted by goodbye-oriented activities that were too fun to be emotional.

Then we went to our last service at Redeemer as New York City residents.

Singing the songs that I’ve now memorized, hearing the voice of Tim that has now become familiar, I felt a shift inside and I knew that beneath my excitement about our new life there was a canyon I’d soon have to explore full of throat-thickening, layered, ongoing emotional debt to the city that I owe my new life to.  (God working through that city, of course, but you get the idea.)  And how natural, how perfect that I peek into that canyon for the first time, touch the edges of that debt and instantly tear up at its vastness, while I am sitting in the place where I first felt at home in the city.  My first Sunday at Redeemer in July of 2005 capped off a week of wandering unfamiliar streets and confronting a new breed of brash inhabitants, still feeling the pang of venturing so far from the only home I ever knew.  My eyes were still wet with goodbyes and my palms sweaty with uncertainty about my life-altering decision when I walked through the doors of this church I had heard so much about.  Within minutes, I was reminded that any place where truth is spoken (even with a Yankee accent) can become home, and my heart finally began to rest in the city.

So our last night in the city we were leaving included the church I love, the place where I learned that the real God is so much better than the one I created in my own image.  So much bigger, so much riskier, so much kinder, so much more fun. Here I exchanged a performance-based religion for a grace-based faith, instructions and lists for narrative and story, false perfection for beauty-inspiring flaws.  A lifelong walk with a God whom I now love and enjoy, and one who I now can say with certainty actually delights in me.  I have Redeemer to thank for my freedom.

We had post-church dinner with a close circle of friends at the only restaurant in town serving cheese dip (point for Atlanta).  A beautiful, meandering walk home (point for New York) and some tearful goodbyes.  Then the BF and I grabbed a bottle of wine (thank you, J and N) and headed up to the roof where he proposed five months ago.  We turned on some music and within seconds I realized that our farewell scene was set to Dave Matthews singing “Say Goodbye.”  Sipping my wine, being held by the man I love (yet another gift of God via this city), I looked around at the kind of night found only in Manhattan: a sky lit not by stars but by the light of a thousand buildings, ant-sized people with their own stories wandering glowing streets, horns and brakes squealing in the distance, quiet enveloping our perch in the sky.  The sadness of leaving began to overtake me until the BF voiced the next thought on my mind: I’m taking the best part of the city with me.

I came to New York looking, like most people, for a kickass addition to my life resume: New Yorker.  Fitting since at the time, I needed characteristics to pad my anemic sense of identity.  I figured I was in for a demolition from the city that specializes in them.  Instead, I faced five years of a recovery project–the buffing away of layers of self-protective garb.  Judgment, fear, guardedness…all exposed for their uselessness and tossed out in the realization that I was already protected, and breathtakingly so.  My New York education unearthed more truth than twenty-three years of formal schooling could even touch.  Our time on the roof, my perfect goodbye to the city, reminded me of all I’ve learned…and of all that’s been done on my behalf.  The messes I’ve made, and the grace bestowed on me in the midst of them.  The friendships with people of a caliber I have to stand on tiptoe to see. The financial transfusions from parents I know so much differently–and better–across the country than I did from a driving distance.  The arrival of true love. I am a girl whose heart has found multiple spots to land: in pine straw and grass yards, in sand and sea water, in concrete and glass.  A girl who cried leaving her home for the city, and now cries leaving her city home for the next one. A lucky girl, according to E.B.White:

It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

One of my going-away gifts was White’s timeless essay, This Is New York, from AC.  She and I subscribe to the same narrative of grace: messy, beautiful, life-giving, paradoxical.  All of which describe New York, a home to which I will be saying Goodbye and Thank You for the rest of the new life it gave me.