Who am I? I am a juncture of stories, and a story of junctures. I am especially aware of the junctures this week.

Friday was, to the day, the 6th anniversary of my saying yes to the job offer that propelled my uprooting from St. Louis and transplanting to Western Pennsylvania. The multiple tectonic shifts of that time rendered me a different person.
When I came here, I settled in Center Township, but only later learned that nearby Aliquippa was my home town. Aliquippa is a post-steel mill town in sore need of structural healing. There is a story there that I had to learn; and there is a story I envision there that I pray is even now unfolding. It now shapes who I am. Yesterday ended the third Geneva Spring Break mission team to stay at my house and go work in Aliquippa, at Uncommongrounds Cafe.
I am always sobered by departures: one minute my house is buzzing with 8 college students; the next minute, apart from the agitating washer filled with sheets and towels, the place is palpably silent.
Also this week I learned that my dog, Miles, who, at 10, is rather “lumpy-bumpy,” has one lump that’s no harmless fatty mass. With a single visit to the vet, he, who has been my companion through the tectonic shifts, and I took a turn into “last days together.”
Yesterday my daughter’s boyfriend asked if he could marry my daughter! In a matter of a couple hours, my perspective on things has boomed around like a sail in a stiff breeze. It’s as if I have to relive the past in light of this new thing that God is forging. And the family reconfigures…to what?
At week’s beginning, the world was dirty white, the wearied legacy of the snowiest February on record; a run of sunny days (well-nigh miraculous in Pittsburgh), and the snow receded to uncover flattened grass and…bulbs pushing up! I even saw crocus in bloom!
I can lose myself in the junctures. For a juncture changes the story in a rug-yanking way. In the moments, days, months, just after the juncture, significance is up for grabs. Including my own. Who am I?
The center of history is a juncture. God gave up his Son, to death…and then to marriage. In the earth-quaking darkness of Good Friday, my identity and yours hung in the balance with Christ’s. I was defined in that horrific hour. No here-and-now juncture will define me more deeply than that one did.
In the dark space just after a juncture, it, and I, may seem otherwise. I may marvel at the shift, taste the silence, bear the ache of longing, seek the presence of the Love that will not let me go, and wait patiently for the sense of the new thing, and of who I am, to unfold.