Home, Where I Least Expected to Discover It

Fifteen years ago today I began a new life. In a sense that is nothing conspicuously significant. It wouldn't be the last new life I would begin in the course of those fifteen years -- some on the far side of curves that threatened to scuttle me. The difference is that none of the subsequent new beginnings involved a car and a thousand-mile change of address. Fifteen years ago today I drove into Des Moines, Iowa after a lifetime firmly planted in Texas.

It hadn't occurred to me that I would ever live outside of Texas. It never occurred to me that I would ever live in Iowa. It certainly hadn't occurred to me that I would likely live out the rest of the my life in Des Moines. But then who ever knows about such things?

I remember calling my parents the next day to report a safe arrival, mentioning that "it was zero degrees when I rolled into town, and then it got cold." Indeed it did. It was my first experience with sub-zero weather; truly a foreign land.

But it was a land shortly to become home in every way that matters. I'm quite certain that I will always be a Texan -- that Lone Star illuminates every corner of my personal universe, and I read, for better and for worse, by its light -- but I am almost as certain that I'll not live there again. It was a good move fifteen years ago, in countless ways I could not have predicted, and I am grateful -- not so much for what I left behind, because I keep that ever and blessedly with me. No, I am grateful for the new world, indeed the new life, I have subsequently found, where least I would have expected it.

Fifteen years later, no one could still be more surprised than me.

Living proof that God works in mysterious ways.