One of my recently developed hobbies is to DVR travel shows.  (Does pressing a button and sitting on a couch constitute a hobby?  I say yes!) Samantha Brown on the Travel Channel stars in some of my favorites (Passport to Europe, Great Hotels), and I watch her narrate her adventures whenever The Husband isn’t around, because he can’t stand her.  (He finds her voice annoying and hates the way she meanders away from the camera after making a cheesy comment.  He is right, but the difference is that I can see past these qualities and he can’t.  I know.  I can’t help it, I’m just so tolerant.)  Imagine my surprise the other day when I played her episode on Honduras and watched as she explored a tiny town called Copan Ruinas, a village I visited as part of a dental outreach trip three years ago with NYU (travel opportunities and free coffee were the two perks of working there. The salary was not).

I stared at Sam (nicknames–we’re cool like that) and ignored her dorkiness as she wandered around the cobblestone streets of the village where our group lived for a week–streets we strode across with purpose in the mornings to fix teeth then stumbled upon with buzzes at night to head home after drinks at El Sapo Rojo. Then she headed to the ruins ten minutes away, which we had also visited, our heads pounding from one too many of the prior night’s Uterus shots (don’t ask). What I remember from my visit there is hearing, in between waves of nausea and sips of Powerade, that the archaeologists’ job is defined by exposing, not rebuilding.  Buried underneath layers of earth and centuries of progress are temples and cities, perfectly preserved by nature and waiting to be revealed by the most careful of hands.  You know where I’m going with this, right?

Sam’s tour guide had a few more degrees than ours did, and he spoke of the only two to three feet worth of progress made in one direction each day, the seeming interminability and tediousness of it all.  Then he brought her to the base of one of the largest temples on the site, and they looked up to behold three stories of ancient grandeur.  Further discussion with the guide revealed the ever-present impetus behind such labor: the excavators, mostly from the area like himself, are driven by a pride in their history and in the revealing of their magnificent heritage.

Naturally, I bundled up all this information and swung it back to my own narrative.  When I moved to New York, I wanted to build a New Me.  Demolish the old mess and start from the ground up on something more…impressive. Within a few months of my being there, I realized that in a city packed to the shore’s edge with people and buildings, there’s not a lot of room for new construction.  But the grit and grime of the city is an excellent exfoliant, and as I lived out my transferred existence I watched the layers of falseness that I had wrapped myself in over the years fall away after a good scrubbing.  All of the effort it had taken to be Not Me was released, too–my new lightness was due to more than just hours of walking.

And so in the aftermath of my own archaeological period, I build another new life with the one who was there for my New York Me revealing.  I don’t have the city  to hold me accountable to authenticity, but I do have him.  And I have the one who engineered the whole thing, who was too full of love to let me continue reading lines from a play I wrote; too full of purpose to let my short-sighted plan stand.  I realize now that working to have it all together, even maintaining that appearance of order, is actually chaos.  Decay waiting to happen, earth waiting to crumble. But this life–the falling down, the breaking open, the journey 1000 miles north and 850 miles south, the always heartache followed by happily ever after, the wiping of counters and scrubbing of toilets–this is not a life having it all together, it is a life together. With him, with all of you, and most of all, with Him. Because when I put pen to paper now, it is not to draw a map of the future but to transcribe my narrative now.  I am learning, in this season of gratitude that I hope never ends, to see the ways He works in this world, to recognize that every time I watch counter-intuitiveness trump predictability, He is in it; every time I witness paradox proclaim truth, He is there; every moment I am involved in making this world a little less cluttered with my mess–my ingratitude, my need to control–I am, with Him, ushering in His kingdom on earth.  Redemption discards my performing as it shows up in my incapability, embracing the Master’s excavation of who I was made to be.