I think I want to start blogging again. To help and force me to process things that I have ignored for so long. I hope to use a narrative of a man in a house with a bed. I hope that others respond to my process as that’s how I learn, but, I also learn through journalling so this may just become a public one of those.

I want to look at a few things

• my relabelling. As a child, I was given a beautiful faith, wonderful love of others and child-like awe of most things. But in my late teens, I concluded that God was bigger than the church building we had built, beginning a journey of relabelling what I knew to what I found I would believe.
• my journey as a missionary. In January 2020 I will have been a missionary for 10 years. I want to process some of the big events during those 10 years as a part of my process and to celebrate a milestone.
• And “nebažnyčia”. Lithuanian for not church. I want to create a community here. But as I relabel and find myself in a country whose language I don’t have a great grasp of, the shape of that is looking to be odd. So I want to understand what I actually crave.

To begin I have been thinking about two beds. The bed I have lived in all my life and the bed I need to make and start sleeping in. My current bed is super comfy. I have known it all my life. It has supported me, it makes sense, it’s super warm etc. But it is also toxic. It’s too small. I find it awkward to be around and I wake up with back pain. But every time I think of starting to make a new bed, I return to the old bed because it’s so easy. So familiar. And in moments, so very comfortable.

I know I need to make a new bed. That bed will be so…. in the words of one of my favourite people:

“That old bed was very like. Bottom sheet, top sheet, blanket, doona, two pillows and it was all white and a weird aluminum painted white too. Your new bed is like something you are going to carve yourself, out of a big piece of mahogany, it’s going to rich 1000 thread cotton, blankets you never knew could feel so comforting a doona so fluffy and light like sleeping beneath a cloud etc”

I miss sleeping beneath a cloud. As I have slept in such a bed before. And I will again. But for a few seasons, I need to get comfortable with contradictions. Being between two beds.