30 Day Photo Challenge - Day 10 - Childhood Memory

I have found myself marveling lately at the way life brings us around, how we come full circle, how we feel at peace when we come back to a place, revisit something, bring it back around... I mentioned this in my post on Day 4 of the photo challenge. It was interesting, both unsettling and comforting at the same time (if that's possible), that we ended up camping at Spirit Mountain so soon after Gabe's death, when the last time T. was at Spirit Mountain was with Gabe. I chose the destination without knowing that, but it was as though something was calling us back to the place. And the night that we finally walked out to the chairlifts there was a glorious lightning storm with a purple sky and great crashes of thunder. It was quite satisfying really. There was plenty of pain in the moment but, also, a certain comfort...in the same way that we all felt the need to visit the scene of the accident while we were in Colorado. We just had to go back to the place.

I have an entirely different feeling about spending Shabbat evening with our friends, and, yet, there is this one piece of similarity. It brings back childhood memories of Bible Study at the first house where I lived, before I was in Kindergarten. It brings me full circle in a way I didn't expect. What I've been longing for in a spiritual community for so long is something true, something free, something natural. When I was a very small child, Bible study was simple, full of simple songs and a certain fresh openness that the early hippie Christians had back in those days. Something happened later that turned the church more rigid, more controlling, more arrogant. But back then there was an eagerness to learn and an openness to whatever might come. And we sang these same song that we sing now on Friday nights for Shabbat. It astonishes me every time I am brought back to that old comforting feeling, that childhood memory of being 4 years old and surrounded by new faith. And then I know that I am home. And this is right. And this is where I belong.