I guess this big football weekend has me thinking back to my time on The Plains. As an only child who had never been anywhere, I had a rough adjustment to college. But once I got over that hump, my Auburn years were some of the happiest of my life—final exams notwithstanding. (That's me and my big hair, studying on the steps of the apartment Missey and I shared around 1983 or 84.)
During those first trying weeks, I thought that if I could ever get myself situated and satisfied in college, then everything would be easy. But that wasn’t true. What happens when you love the home you left and grow to love the one you’ve come to is that you’re always missing somebody. You’re always telling somebody goodbye—either your friends when you go home or your family when you return to school.
That’s a pattern that followed me for years. Good things always seemed to come with partings—leaving home for Auburn, leaving Auburn for Baylor, leaving Baylor for my first job (back at Auburn), leaving again for what would become my career in Birmingham . . . It was actually a relief to travel with Southern Living photographers who struggled with the same dilemma—that we couldn’t do the work we loved without leaving the people we loved, at least for a little while. The flip side, of course, is that we met people and explored places that stayed with us always. (That’s the thing about great stories—they never really leave you. Maybe that’s why I love them so much.)
We’ve entered a season of partings and reunions—Christmas Eve with one side of the family and Christmas Day with the other; college students coming home for Christmas break and returning to their friends after the holidays.
It's much bigger than that, of course. A Father and Son temporarily parted. A birth to overcome death. A promise of homecoming and reunion.
Let not your heart be troubled:
ye believe in God, believe also in me.
In my father’s house are many mansions:
if it were not so, I would have told you.
I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go and prepare a place for you,
I will come again, and receive you unto myself;
that where I am, there ye may be also.
John 14: 1-4
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