[sometimes] #onthemove

Sometimes you want to dance waltzes. Waltzes that encircle all the gas stations you stopped at, all the new people you smiled at awkwardly as you ordered the pork chops with a local sauce you hoped wouldn't taste like smoke. You want to surround all the highway lanes which skimmed past, the white dotted lane boundaries folding together like the pages of a flip book, becoming one line. All the state signs, state boundaries. States - including Illinois.

(Dear People Who Live in Illinois,

I don't know how you do it. It is very flat. It is very, very flat. And the clouds made faces at me and pretended they were whales smoking. It made the road trip more interesting. But it was very flat.)

And you get the end of the road, and snuggle down in someone else's house on white feather-beds resting beneath zebra pillows. The brick neighborhood sits quietly manicured on the doorstep of the place you now call home for 14 weeks.

You want to sing “is this home, am I here for a day or forever?” but then you realize that song was sobbed out between chattering teeth of a prisoner named Belle. You are no prisoner! Not spiritually, not physically. You're here to fight for those imprisoned by injustice. And so, even though the first line seems to fit (because this is home – but home with smiles, not with tears,) you more have to belt out old Godspell standards and dance through the streets with the neighborhood dogs following your new boxer named Rocky, making friends with the trees and the polished street signs and the natives who wear a southern flair like jewelry as they wish you good mornings between sips of coffee.

This is Tennessee. This is where the adventure starts. Here in a city not so unlike my own, eating food exactly like the food I ate yesterday when I sat at my own wooden kitchen table. Except I do not know the wooden tables here. I haven't memorized the bubbles underneath the polyurethane or walked the cobblestones to and from work yet. I haven't met but one soul by name – but I will. I will meet a thousand souls in a thousand different places in life. Because they say life is what happens when you're not looking, and yet I desperately want to start looking.

We're here for the the voiceless, working above guitar shops in office suites so that orphans can be brought home. Running thrift stores as we run our mouths, being talkers because the talkers aren't heard. We're obnoxiously vocal and wordy sometimes because anyone who ever had something to say and couldn't say it needs to be heard through us. Interns for orphans, but going through life fighting the battles worth fighting for anyone in need of advocacy even as we struggle with the pointless battles in our own lives. Humans loving humans because we serve a relational God. 

Hello, my name is 2014 Fall Intern, and I like words. I recently used a lot of them and cried because I have never been an intern before, and sometimes when we go outside of our comfort zone so someone can have a comfort zone, it makes our words muddled. I also am not that upset about having to drive through Illinois for 5 hours, because it was actually very beautiful. And sometimes I make friends with Red Buses and Boxers and fellow interns I've never met. On Monday I may even hug them just because I finally get to meet them. 

These are the thoughts of an amateur intern, sitting on leather couches and in hipster-insipred coffee shops pretending that she frequently smells musty books and often wears gray Keds because gray is her favorite color. Gray is her favorite color. 

But red makes a statement. 

These are the first words of many words.

#redbusproject                 

On the Move for Orphans