Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything. For that I deeply apologize. Although there have been times of inconsistency in the past, to a large degree I have been fairly regular at writing something, at least monthly, but I haven’t written anything since November. Sheesh.
As I see it, there are a few questions that need to be answered before I can write anything more on this blog. The first one is fairly short and pretty easy to answer, and I ask it more for myself than for anyone else. The second one is not so easy, and is asked for the sakes of both myself and for all of you.
Question One
First question: Why haven’t I blogged more since arriving in Portland?
It’s a question that I have asked of myself many times these last several months. Moving to Portland was a big change. It required a great deal of both Laura and me, and there have been a lot of things blog-worthy to talk about. So why haven’t I written about any of them?
The short answer: I haven’t wanted to.
Now, I know that sounds arrogant and may make me come across as pretentious. That’s not what I mean when I write it, though. When I say that I haven’t wanted to write, I’m talking more about the emotional side of me – the elusive, rarely-seen-except-when-I’m-grumpy part of Ryan that usually only comes out to say hello to Laura. When I say that I haven’t wanted to write, what I mean is that I just haven’t been able to get things together enough to put them into words.
I am not by any means a communicator. It takes a lot out of me to talk with someone, and I rarely do justice to my thoughts when speaking. I’m far more expressive when writing, but even this drains a great deal of my energy. Every time something has come up that screamed, “write about me!”, I just haven’t been able to muster the fortitude needed to do so. For whatever reason, I have not been able to lift the pen to the paper (well, metaphorically speaking, as both pen and paper are essentially obsolete).
I think a big part of it comes with the way my mind works. I am about as internal of a processor as there comes. I usually don’t say much, vocally. Sure, you get me playing a game or put a little alcohol in me and I’ll start to blabber, but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m talking about the big stuff. The important things. The things that people write books about, the things that keep people awake in the middle of the night. Some people can put their fingers to a keyboard and start moving them, and miraculously, everything they’re thinking just appears on the screen! That’s not me. The words I’m writing at this very moment were processed, evaluated, and refined while standing in the shower this morning.
What’s more, my brain works very strangely, very randomly. It’s like I have mental ADD. My mind’s eye never focuses on one concept for long. It’s darting around, touching one subject lightly, then whizzing off to another, completely unrelated to the first. I feel like I’m always processing a thousand things at once, yet never fully working on any topic at all.
Because of that, it takes me forever to process anything. Anyone who knows me from Adam knows that I need time to process things – a lot of time, really. It’s because that item gets added to my mental queue, and probably won’t be addressed sufficiently for at least a couple of hours – sure, I’ll touch it a little here and there from the very beginning, but to do my best work on it, I need to defragment it first. Sometimes, I’ll be lying in bed, and I’ll suddenly decide conclusively on something that I’d started days before.
Blog-wise, this means that anytime there’s something I should write about, I take forever to think about what I’d write. Usually, by the time I’ve come up with something to write, it’s either obsolete or there’s something else that I should be writing about. Now obviously, this has been true of me for my whole life. But this mental processing, compounded with all the different things I’ve had to process here in Portland, has meant that I just haven’t had the time – no, scratch that – the willpower to add one more thing in maintaining a blog.
Now, that may have all seemed a little over-the-top for a question like, “why haven’t you blogged in a while?”, and it is, I don’t deny that. However, the reason I went through that work of outlining my own crazy mind is because it also impacts my answer for the second question.
Question Two
And that brings us to my second question, the question which is really the one this blog post is about. It’s a question I’ve been asked numerous times in the last two months, and I’m sure it’s the question that many of our friends and family are still asking when they think about us.
Second question: Why are we moving out of Portland and back to Oklahoma?
Not an easy question to answer, for sure. Hopefully the explanation about how my brain works convinces you that we did not arrive at this decision flippantly or without ample evaluation. Truthfully, it was an agonizingly slow and difficult decision. There were so many factors that went into this decision, and so many different elements that I needed to process slowly and over a great period of time. This was a very difficult decision, and the answer to the question is nowhere near as simple as I wish it was. However, having spent a great deal of time processing and defragmenting (can you tell I like this concept?) this question, I believe I have an answer – well, several answers, to be specific, although I weigh some heavier than others.
Reason One
The first (and in my mind, primary) reason for us leaving Portland is because of family.
When I say family, I refer first of all to the distance and difficulty we’ve had connecting with family back east – with brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents. Coming to Portland, I knew that leaving family would be hard on us, on me and Laura both. However, I never imagined that things would be as hard as they have been, particularly for Laura. Of course, in hindsight I know I should have seen it, but hindsight is always better than foresight, and I’ve had bad eyesight since the third grade.
Throughout seminary, Laura and I had tossed around the idea of going to live overseas, somewhere in Europe perhaps. In the end, we decided against it, and one of the primary reasons we decided against that was because I did not think that we’d be able to survive so far from family. When we heard about the ministry here in Portland, I thought we’d found the perfect solution: a Europe-like ministry that wasn’t far from our family! After all, I thought, a timezone difference of only two/three hours really isn’t that bad, comparatively! Laura and I will be fine.
Oh, what a fool I was.
I knew something was off from the day we arrived. Moving to Portland was not the first time we’d relocated. In a sense, the two of us have spent this first decade of our lives as American nomads, repeatedly (almost regularly) packing up our stuff and relocating hundreds or even thousands of miles away. I know what to expect of myself and of my wife when we arrive at a new place. We move our stuff in, we unpack at a ridiculous speed, and we start setting down the roots. We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again – although hopefully not too many times more, the wanderlust is quickly burning out of our systems!
When Laura excused herself immediately after unloading the truck and went into the bedroom to be alone, I knew something was a bit off. That’s not the routine. We don’t relax after unloading, we relax after unpacking. It’s always been that way. If anything, Laura’s the one that pushes me to keep going. I’m not going to lie, I was a bit confused when she left – and then I was a bit worried.
Eventually, though, I wrote it off as new location jitters and decided to press on. We did finish unpacking and set about our business. The first piece of business was to acquaint ourselves with our new home; our second piece of business was to find a real piece of business – that is, to find jobs. We didn’t have much money to do many activities, but I was confident (naively) that we’d have jobs soon enough, and so we went on with life, with the stuff that normal people do.
What I’d written off as new location jitters, however, did not disappear from Laura, however. If anything, it magnified over time. What’s more, I started to feel the same. Although we both made friends in Portland, there was still something missing, something wrong. For me, it was like a nagging, itching loneliness. I can only imagine what it was for Laura.
Still, I wrote it off, this time as culture shock. After all, even though Portland is in America, it’s culture is very different from either the northeast or the southwest that we were familiar with (I wrote about this in one of the few blogs I did write while here in Portland, you can check that out if you’d like). Give it time, I thought to myself and said to Laura, just give it time and it’ll get better.
Then Melanie and Tony’s wedding arrived.
The wedding itself was awesome. We had a great time celebrating the union between two people we love deeply, and for most of the week we lost ourselves in the social festivities. But then it came time for us to leave. And as I watched my wife’s emotions swing from happiness to a deep sort of sorrow, I realized that perhaps, just perhaps, it wasn’t just new location jitters, that it wasn’t just culture shock. Maybe, just maybe this was something more, something worse. I wasn’t sure.
There was one thing I was sure of, though. I was sure that I missed my wife. What I mean is, I missed the woman that my wife became when she was around her family for the wedding. Smiling. Laughing. In a word: alive. The woman that Laura was in Portland before the wedding was not the woman I’d married. Perhaps even more importantly, she was not the woman she could and should be. I resolved, then and there, without any need for more processing or for more defragmenting, that I was going to do whatever it took for me to bring that woman back. I was going to take care of my family.
And so we arrive at my second meaning of family–that of the immediate family, of a husband’s relationship to his wife.
To be completely honest, I did not know what it would take to do that, to care for my family. I didn’t know if it meant encouraging Laura to press on in Portland. I didn’t know if it meant leaving. I knew I didn’t want to make a hasty decision. I knew I didn’t want to make the wrong decision. But I just didn’t know what to do. Although part of me wanted to just whoosh Laura away, to swoop in and rescue her from all that was troubling me, another part did not want to give up on all we’d hoped and committed to do, all we’d hoped to accomplish with our move to Portland. To that extent, Laura and I decided that we’d make no decision until the end of the year, roughly two and a half months from that point.
There is perhaps nothing more agonizing for a man than to have to choose between his wife and his ministry. Now, I know it’s not that cut-and-dry, that they are not as diametrically opposed as I make it sound, and it’s not fair on Laura to put it that way, I know that. To a great extent, though, I spent those two and a half months essentially asking that question: which do I choose? Do I press on with this ministry, striving to at least fulfill a year and perhaps more, while my wife suffers? Or do I leave this ministry that I’d thought God had called us to, probably letting down everyone I work with here, in order to look after the woman I’ve pledged to care for, regardless of any circumstance?
It took me a long while to answer this question, as the ADD brain I talked about with my first question really struggled with this issue. In the end, it became for me a matter of priorities. Although I believe(d) that the ministry in Portland is important – incredibly, infinity-impactingly important — I believe(d) that my ministry to my wife is more so, if only slightly and in a different manner. Not only that, it’s a ministry that only I can do. Having come to Portland and joined the people here for a time, I have incredible faith that God will do something mighty in this city through them. And although I know I bring strengths to the ministry here, I also believe that, with or without me, they will succeed here.
However, there is only one person who can fulfill the ministry role of godly husband to Laura, and that is me. And although I believe Laura could have survived and adapted fine to Portland, I do not believe that her full potential would be seen here, because for that potential to be unlocked requires her to have access to familial support she’ll never be able to receive in Portland.
In my short years on this earth, I’ve realized about myself that I play a much better support role than anything else. I’m not the best front man; I don’t even like being the front man. But I have a strong back. I help people succeed by taking care of the things behind the scenes, by improving the things they’re weak in. I support people, that’s what I do. Heck, I even prefer the support classes in the video games I play, preferring roles like healers or scouts or ammo re-suppliers. (I also like sniper rifles, but that’s neither here nor there…)
I know that if I stayed here in Portland, I’d be of aid to those here, and I also know that leaving makes their lives more difficult, something I really hate. But I know also, from the core of my soul, that by choosing to support my wife, I’ll empower her to do great things in this life. And so perhaps my choice shows a bit of my faith in Laura. It shows that I believe she’s destined to make an impact on this world. It shows that I trust her to help others, and to leave her mark. It shows that I believe in her. And if I accomplish nothing else in this life besides lifting my wife to become a godlier woman who impacts the kingdom of God, than I know that I’ll have succeeded greatly in ministry.
Family. With all its nuances, that is my first and foremost reason for choosing to leave Portland.
Reason Two
The second major reason for us leaving Portland is probably not as big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, but is immensely important in the short term, and that’s because of money – or, perhaps more appropriately, our lack of money.
As I indicated above, I thought that both Laura and I would have been able to secure stable jobs fairly quickly. After all, we’re both very experienced, and I have a graduate’s degree – how hard could it be?
Really. Flippin. Hard.
Fast forward six months from when we arrived, and neither Laura nor I have stable, full-time work. There were months when we didn’t have enough money to pay for the gas we needed to get to the jobs we did have. It became very obvious to both Laura and me that we weren’t going to be able to afford this situation for much longer.
Logistically, leaving Portland eventually became the only choice for us. Sure, we could continue scraping by, but did that really make sense? How long can one really live like that? There’s only so much craigslist a person can take before the purple peace sign becomes anathema.
“Why didn’t you plan for this better?” you’re probably asking, and I agree, I should have. I don’t have a great answer, to be honest. Naivety? Idealism? Foolishness? Probably a bit of all of that, and a bit else.
To be honest, though, it’s been a good lesson for me. I actually had thought about this before. The first time I was seriously approached with the possibility of joining CA and raising support, I basically said, “No, I can’t, we’re not in a financial situation that’d allow us to do that.” But then people started saying things to me like “God’s work done God’s way will never lack God’s resources,” and I threw wisdom out the window for the idealism that I’m prone to wander after. It seemed like all the advice I received at the time was “trust God and go for it!” I became convinced that it was God’s will for us to move to Portland and to throw caution to the wind. The crazy thing is that I don’t even believe in that sense of “God’s will.” But I allowed myself to get swept up in the excitement.
Looking back, I see that most of those who know us best knew it wasn’t a wise financial choice. Whether they didn’t caution us loudly enough or whether I just chose not to listen I don’t know. All I know is that, financially, we have not been okay since arriving in Portland, and that’s a big part of why we chose to leave.
Reasons Three, and Four, and Five…
There are of course other reasons for us leaving, smaller reasons that I do not believe would have led to the decision we made by themselves. The ministry itself is certainly not what I was expecting, for example, and I really did not feel as needed here as I thought I would be. That would have changed over time, though, I know that. Still, adding a subtle dissatisfaction with my own ministry role on top of everything else added to the mess.
We also had a hard time adjusting culturally to the people around us. I’m not a hipster, I don’t particularly care for flannel, and I unabashedly like mainstream music and the UFC. Also, I’m not white (not completely), like 85% of this city is. A city of white people is very interesting, indeed. Laura also did not find many people she “cliq’ed” with (even though she is completely white).
Finally – and this is a big one for Laura – we hope to start the adoption process soon enough, and honestly – there’s really no hope for that in the near or far future if we stay here in Portland.
Closing question
And so I end with another question, a question I know I’ll continue asking myself for years to come: Was coming to Portland a mistake?
Did we make a grievous mistake, moving here? Does the fact that we’re leaving mean we went against God’s will? Was Portland a mistake for us?
Like I said, I don’t believe in that sense of God’s will. I do believe it wasn’t the wisest choice we’ve ever made. And I do regret the impact that our coming and going has had on the ministry here. I hate, absolutely hate, feeling like I let people down, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t tear me apart having to tell my ministry partners that we were leaving them. I know they care about Laura and me and invested a lot in us, and I’ll always feel indebted to them for their love and support.
But I also believe that a great deal of good came out of our time here. Laura and I have learned lessons that neither of us could have ever learned otherwise. I’ve been incredibly humbled by the things that have happened – and I’ll be the first to admit that I needed to be humbled, badly (and probably still need a bit more humility, tbh). And I do believe that, even in our short stint here in this city with this ministry, we did some good here.
Generally speaking, I don’t spend much time dwelling on the past or regretting it. The past is what made me who I am, and all I can do is learn from it and look forward. I believe that will hold true for Portland, as well. I have genuinely enjoyed my time here in Portland. I’ve made some great relationships both inside the church and out, and I hope to continue all of those relationships. And I know that God has an awesome plan for this city and for these people.
Now here’s my last question, a question directed away from me rather than towards me, a question I can’t wait to have answered: What’s next, God? What’s next?
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