A Moving Story May 2019
It wasn’t my first move. That had been from Dallas to Houston when I was about two years old and back to the same house in Dallas again shortly thereafter. On the day of this move, with all the windows and doors open, the drenching August heat poured in and out of our home on Lovers Lane. These conditions left several entry points, and an advantage, for a small bird to find a little shade. It flew from room to room but wouldn’t go outside. It would be decades before I realized that this was the harbinger of my life to come as we headed to Memphis.
I have lived in four countries: Spain, Mexico, The Philippines and the United States. Within the USA, my homes have been in Texas, Missouri, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey, Tennessee, Colorado, Maryland, and California. My homes have included ships, apartments, mobile homes, condominiums, travel trailers, and houses, with innumerable hotels and motels scattered like spice between the more solid courses of legal addresses. Technically, with the curtains shut in the travel trailers, you would not know that this was a new address when the trailer had been moved. Still, it was a new address. There are now 63 in all.
With each move came a need for translation to the local dialect of all that I had learned before. You would be surprised at how many ways there are to pronounce “pecan” for instance. I never had time to wait on friendships and within the first hour, would ride my bike down the street, corner the first boy I came upon and announce that he had a new friend – me. With all of this came extraordinary adaptability. Though without roots, the adaptability become quite an asset in this ever changing world in which we live.
A Godincident happened when Cindi and I visited her uncle’s home in Dallas just before we were married. I was helping clean up after dinner and looked out the back window from the kitchen sink. Straight across the back yard and one house to the right was that same house on Lovers Lane where we lived when I was born.
Our spirit life is something like what I have been through with all my different addresses. I am exactly the same Bob person that I was in Dallas as a baby, as a child in Swansboro, North Carolina, and eventually a teen in Fallbrook, California. Now all of this seems pretty fantastic but even more incredible was my transition from the spirit world before my birth into the human plain. God has said, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,” which inspired King David to say of Him, “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” One day in the future I will transition again from the human plain to spiritual eternity. So it turns out that we are more like the travel trailer than anything else. Same person, change of address.
A Guy Named Bob 