June 28
Started off the day with some great coffee, homemade blueberry pancakes, a cloudy sky, and conversation. At about 9, we hopped into the truck and headed south. We headed over the bridge and into Oregon, dropping our daughter off at the transit mall so she could spend the day in Portland. Then we went on to Salem. We found the church and rushed through the door rather breathlessly, because it was just about 10:30 and we didn’t want to walk in late. It was a small group, but there was a really good vibe there. It was different than what we are used to, but still good. I enjoyed the way they focused on gratitude in the prayer time. I think that’s so important and often overlooked or considered as a kind of an afterthought. I think that somehow we tend to obsess about what’s going wrong as we see it and we forget to pay attention to what’s going well. But if we can shift our thinking to the things we are grateful for, we can find joy and peace, even in the middle of a hard experience. There was time to talk about the things that aren’t so great, too, but they started with gratitude and I thought that was a powerful thing.
After the meeting for worship, we were able to spend a couple of hours with the pastor of the meeting and the presiding clerk. We had a great conversation and we were grateful that they took the time to talk to us. We learned something about how they started the church and why and how it has been progressing. They can tell it better than I can, so I recommend that you check out their website at www.freedomfriends.org They are a very welcoming and inclusive church and if anyone is looking for a church on a Sunday morning in Salem, Oregon, I can happily suggest that one. They are in a funky little building right near 13th St. And they even have a neon OPEN sign in the window.
As I was riding down the freeway, I was struck by how familiar everything seemed. We lived in Portland from 1987-1995 and I have driven down that road countless times. Now, yesterday when we drove off the freeway and through our old neighborhood, there was much that seemed totally foreign, but still other stuff that made it seem as though I’d only been gone a week. But what struck me the most yesterday was how agitated I felt almost immediately upon entering the city. There were too many cars, too many buildings, too many people, too many things going on. I marveled that I used to actually live in that environment and thought nothing of it. Now that I have been away from it for 14 years, it all seems different. Today, though, we were on the freeway and there wasn’t much of that. There was what seemed like a great deal of traffic for a Sunday morning, but other than that, it all just seemed like something I had done one time too many. The funny thing is, I enjoyed living in Portland. If someone had asked me the best place I’d lived, I would have named that as the place. And now it was just someplace that I was done with. That’s the thing. I was flooded with the knowledge that it is simply time to move on. I know that I am in the process of doing just that, so all I have to do is proceed. Still, there was a twinge of sadness as there is when you realize that something you valued is over.
And so we move on, with a big thank you to Freedom Friends for a great Sunday morning experience and for being so welcoming.
