Steph and I took an emergency trip down to Knoxville TN to visit Lisa during a time in need. We decided to go on Thursday night and Friday morning we rented a car and hit the road. We had a lovely 6 hour drive together... to talk, to sing, to cry, to laugh, to enjoy being in each others presence.
We took Buddah with us... rubbed his belly... prayed to Jesus for a safe trip and for a place to stay and we were off with only the plan to go take care of Lisa. It was a good time to meditate on mysterious things like life and death and suffering and grieving. Still none of which I understand fully. Maybe we are not supossed to fully understand things like that. Things that are not of this world. Spiritual and super natural things. Maybe that is how God keeps us close, by not revealing to us everything we want to know. Maybe not. Just a lot of things were thought about. Thinking about friendship, love, community, and solidarity. When one of us suffer... we all should suffer if we are truly connected in a deep with with each other. The presence of friends in tough times is irreplaceable. Even if all you do is sit and stare at the floor. It does more help than we know.
We made it to Lisa. We got to sit with her and hold her and hug her and cry with her and remember with her and it was a holy and beautiful thing.
Time was ticking and we still didn't know where we were sleeping. I had emailed a few churches in the area the night before and asked for some family hospitality and as expected, got no responses. It's pretty shitty that you can't even count on parts of the body of Christ to put you up for a few nights when in need but you can definately count on couchsurfing.com. We ended up couch surfing with a wonderful girl and her two roommates. We hit the town of Knoxville and got a bite to eat and some drinks at a lovely place called Urban Bar. We met some interesting friends, and hung out with our cool server Travis. We continued to walk around and even found a cereal bar!
We had a good night sleeping with our new stranger friends and really enjoyed the rest of our time in TN. I captured one shot of buddah and Yuengling... i'll leave you with that...
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1 comment:
Hey Ashley!! I found a link to your blog on facebook:)
It's very familiar to hear you talk of trying to find hospitality from churches in Tennessee. We did the same thing this past year during our travels when our van broke down.
Here is the link to the story if it is of any interest to you: http://simplyonelife.org/index.php/blog/comments/what_a_day/
It's kind of long, but somewhat relevant:)
Melissa
PS- We need to go to Bodega sometime soon!
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