Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong

by Sophie Hudson

  Paul bawled his eyes out through every single bit of it.

  Elise pretty much smiled nonstop as she wiped away his tears.

  For the next three or four years, that scene repeated itself over and over again. Sure, the churches were different, the bachelorette parties were different, and the ceremonies were different (nobody ever topped Paul Watson in the crying department; we should have given him a commemorative plaque), but the idea was the same: Wendi married Dave, Marion married Spence, Daph married Jimmy, Emma Kate married Brad, Tracey married Kirk.

  (I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the heat totally overachieved at Tracey and Kirk’s outdoor reception—so much so that Marion and I took it upon ourselves to go inside the house on the property and find a bedroom where we proceeded to hike up the skirts of our bridesmaid’s dresses and stand over the air-conditioning vents for the better part of a half hour.)

  (You might say that’s ridiculous. But I say that it’s resourceful.)

  We seemed to move as a pack from one wedding to another to another to another, and I was increasingly aware that whether I liked it or not, we were heading into a new phase of our lives. Every time I watched another friend hop into a car with “Just Married” written in white shoe polish on the rear window, I felt an unavoidable pang of bittersweetness. I knew that it was right and good and normal for everybody to move into the next season, and I reminded myself that I was beyond fortunate to have spent four years with dear friends who had honest to goodness made me a better person. At the risk of sounding like a Hallmark card or, heaven forbid, someone on The Bachelor, they really had influenced my life in amazing, positive ways, and while I may not have had all my theology ironed out, I could still recognize that those sweet girls were living, breathing examples of God’s faithfulness. They loved me unconditionally, they made me laugh, and they were a surefire guarantee that anything would be fun as long as we were together.

  I was so grateful for that.

  I was so grateful for them.

  And even though change wasn’t my favorite, it thrilled me to see my friends fall in love, especially since I adored all their husbands (I still do, mind you). An added blessing was that I didn’t feel like I was just sitting around and biding my time until I could get married. I very much liked the perks of living by myself, chief among them being able to hibernate in my apartment on a wide-open weekend with an assortment of crackers, a couple of two liters of Diet Coke, and an entire season of The Real World on a VHS tape.

  I don’t mean to imply that Wheat Thins compare to marriage, of course. I’m just pointing out that my needs were relatively simple.

  But still, there was one part of the “moving on” equation that I just could not reconcile.

  I missed my people like crazy.

  The fact that the whole equestrian-print skirt/Adrienne Vittadini sweaters/Olive Garden scenario wasn’t going to work out was insult to injury, really. Granted, I wanted more for my friends than for them to be like Billy in St. Elmo’s Fire and get stuck in a college-life mentality that leads to getting thrown out of bars and then leaving a family to go to New York and pursue a career as a saxophonist.

  I just wanted to figure out a way that we could stay together, dadgummit. Maybe that meant we needed to build ourselves a subdivision with the world’s largest cul-de-sac. And maybe there could be a screened-in porch that connected my house to Emma Kate’s house so we could meet there every morning and evening and sit in a big ole swing and catch up on the news of the day. Maybe Wendi and Marion could share a deck with a built-in sound system that would make karaoke nights and pageant reenactments a breeze. Maybe Elise, queen of the perfect playlist, could serve as our resident DJ, and Tracey, queen of the cheerleaders, could be our choreographer (doesn’t every neighborhood need one of each?). And maybe Daphne and Katy could cochair our homeowners’ association, because heaven knows those two could march into Congress on any given day and STRAIGHTEN OUT SOME THINGS.

  (I could even picture an HOA notice written by Katy. It would say something along the lines of “MOW YOUR GRASS, FOOL.”)

  (Shakespeare may not have known her, but he sure enough described her: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.”)

  But a cul-de-sac wasn’t going to be in our immediate future. And fortunately, I wasn’t completely lacking a healthy, realistic perspective. I could recognize that the years in front of us were chock-full-o-possibilities. That certainly didn’t change how much I missed everybody, but Mama had always told me that sometimes God doesn’t give us what we want because He’d much rather give us what we need.

  I tried to brace myself for whatever that might be.

  And I prayed that it wouldn’t involve another trip to New Orleans in July, oh Lord help us all.

  FOR MOST OF college I drove a 1984 Buick Regal. It was maroon with a white vinyl top (of course it was), and though it was as long as half a city block, it was a two-door, which meant that each door extended almost the full length of the vehicle and weighed roughly eight hundred pounds apiece. Oh, you might want to slam those doors in a fit of anger, but the laws of physics made it all but impossible. The interior was soft maroon velour, and with its power windows, power locks, cassette player, and cruise control, Ye Olde Regal was, at least to me, a mighty nice car for my college days.

  What the Regal was not, however, was reliable. It tended to sputter at red lights or stop signs, and after a few months of the stop-and-start traffic in Starkville, I learned to keep one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake so the engine wouldn’t quit. It was also fond of refusing to go in reverse, which meant there were several times when I parked my car at a friend’s apartment or at my dorm, and when I got ready to leave, I’d have to put the car in neutral and ask someone to push me backward. Eventually I learned the blessing of a pull-through parking space, but that wasn’t possible at, say, Sonic—unless I was prepared to jump a couple of curbs and run over the metal picnic tables.

  By my junior year, the Regal was in the shop with annoying regularity; if it wasn’t the transmission, it was the catalytic converter, and if it wasn’t the catalytic converter, it was the alternator, and if it wasn’t the alternator, it was the battery. When I’d go home on the weekends, I’d sometimes have to swap cars with Mama or Daddy so the Regal could stay in Myrtlewood for repairs, but by the end of my junior year, I think Daddy was as tired of fooling with it as I was.

  One of the Regal’s more endearing qualities was that if I didn’t want the engine to spit and backfire and quit, I had to drive at a sustained speed of at least thirty miles an hour. This was all fine and good until I found myself in a parking lot, where driving over, say, ten miles per hour was generally a really bad idea. In fact, one time I was at the mall in Columbus, Mississippi, when the Regal decided to die in front of McRae’s department store, and when I finally got the car cranked again, I was so determined to get out of that parking lot and back on the highway to Starkville that I caught a wheelie you could have heard in three counties.

  So basically what I’m saying is that the Regal lent a certain element of class and sophistication to my college years.

  You’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that you haven’t lived until your vehicle has backfired in a jam-packed Taco Bell drive-thru.

  The nail in the Regal’s coffin was when it stopped running one day on Highway 82 between Columbus and Starkville. It’s one thing to be an ongoing source of comic relief, but it had crossed over into “unsafe” territory. Daddy started looking for new (used) cars back home in Myrtlewood, and once I got home for summer vacation, I started throwing my ideas and opinions into the search.

  I’m sure Daddy really appreciated my input. Especially considering that I was contributing approximately zero dollars to the transaction.

  Daddy eventually decided on a car that I absolutely loved. It was Jeep’s first foray into the car market—an Eagle Premier—and it ticked all of our boxes. Daddy liked it because it was an American car—a reasonably
priced, seemingly sturdy sedan—and I liked it because it had all sorts of bells and whistles. The seat belts automatically positioned themselves when you closed the door, the blinker made a pleasant chiming sound, and the dashboard had a digital display that showed fuel economy, miles traveled, miles remaining on a tank of gas, etc. I’ve always liked a boxy car, and this one was just that; I imagined that I’d drive it for years and years to come.

  Well.

  You can pretty much guess what happened next.

  After two or three months, the left axle—THE LEFT AXLE—needed to be repaired. On top of that, the fuses that controlled all those bells and whistles blew out so frequently that I not only carried spares in my glove compartment, I also knew how to install them. In fact, I did just that often enough that I contemplated adding a pair of coveralls to my wardrobe—complete with “Soph” embroidered over the pocket. The air conditioner quit working three or four times, the power steering went out, and those fancy seat belts developed an annoying habit of moving halfway into place—and then stalling. About a year and a half after we got the car, Mississippi had an especially hard winter, and when I hopped in the driver’s seat one morning after a hard freeze, the little digital console thing wouldn’t light up or turn on. It remained completely inactive until the next spring, when it lit up and started to beep one night on a drive from Jackson to Starkville.

  I guess it finally thawed.

  By year two I couldn’t identify a single part of the Screamin’ Eagle, as I called it, that hadn’t been repaired—with the exception of the seats and the trunk (thank goodness the car was still under warranty; otherwise I imagine Daddy would have just driven it to the pasture and SET IT ON FIRE). It overheated at the drop of a hat, creaked like it was 105 years old, and randomly emitted loud, unpleasant noises. When David and I were dating, there was even one time when we were driving through a subdivision in Myrtlewood, and I KID YOU NOT, the front bumper fell totally off the car for no discernible reason.

  Seriously. That bumper dropped it like it was hot. Right in the middle of Mission Hill Estates.

  It was so par for the course that I didn’t even panic. I just put the car in park, opened my door, asked David to help me pick up the bumper, and in about six seconds we had it snapped back on.

  It was almost like I drove a Mr. Potato Head.

  But here’s the strangest part of all: despite all the trouble I had with that car, I loved it beyond reason. I knew every quirk it had—the way I could pop the horn off the steering wheel and honk it while it rested in my lap, the way I had to put cassettes in the tape player so it wouldn’t immediately spit them out, the way I needed to position a piece of Tupperware on the passenger floorboard in case the air conditioner leaked—and I wasn’t deterred by a single bit of it. Even though that car looked shiny and fancy on the outside, it was stubborn, it was temperamental, and it was prone to breakdowns.

  On some level, I think I related to it. That car and I had more than a few things in common.

  One Friday afternoon I drove to Myrtlewood to put my car in the shop for the sixth or seventy-ninth time. Since it wasn’t fixed by the time I went back to school on Sunday, my daddy let me borrow his car for the return trip. He drove a beige Crown Victoria, which is basically a land yacht—exactly what every college girl fancies as her dream car.

  This particular trip happened to coincide with what the modern-day church would call “a season of rebellion” in my life. My husband always tells me that when I talk about my early twenties, I make it sound like I was running a drug-smuggling ring and then murdering people in my spare time, so I want to be sure I don’t overdramatize what I was dealing with. The reality is that a big chunk of my rebellion was straight-up selfishness with a whole lot of lying and sneakiness to try to get exactly what I thought I wanted. I told myself that I was way better than “other people” because I wasn’t sleeping around or messing with drugs, but make no mistake: I was the most manipulative Pollyanna wannabe that you ever did see. I wasn’t terribly concerned with the well-being of anyone other than me, myself, and I, and in addition to that, I can look back on some of the stuff I was reading and watching back then, and it’s all too evident that I was increasingly comfortable with indulging my own darkness.

  Bottom line: I was one stiff-necked somebody. Nobody could tell me anything since I thought I already knew it all (just ask Emma Kate, who tried and tried to get to the root of what was going on with me), and for the first time in my life, I felt cynical and pessimistic. My words were careless and disrespectful (not to mention that I’d developed significant affection for words that would have gotten me suspended when I was in high school), and since Scripture tells us that out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks (see Luke 6:45), it was pretty evident that a good portion of my overflow was dark, stagnant, and foul.

  Okay. I might be on the verge of overdramatic mode again.

  But you get the idea. Yes, there was part of me that was still a bow-headed sorority girl with incredibly sweet, loving friends. Yes, I was a people pleaser who cared a whole lot about what other people thought. But my issues weren’t just Oh my gosh, y’all, I have not had a quiet time in four days and I’m, like, SO SAD because I just miss Jesus SO MUCH.

  I was willingly sitting in some very real sin. And I was consistently wrestling with some very real shame.

  It was late in the afternoon when Daddy’s Crown Victoria and I hit the road to Starkville, and I was about fifteen miles into the trip when I started thumbing through his collection of cassette tapes. Daddy went on a big praise-and-worship kick in the early nineties, so there was no point in looking for the latest cassette single by Paula Abdul. There was gospel and there was praise music and there were collections of instrumental hymns with nary a Fresh Prince or DJ Jazzy Jeff song in the bunch.

  After some deliberation, I finally picked up a greatest-hits album by the Maranatha! Singers and stuck it in the cassette player. Praise-and-worship music wasn’t as widely used in churches as it is now, but I’d learned many of the choruses at high school church camp—and from listening to the music that Mama played in the kitchen when I was home.

  For the first few songs, I halfheartedly sang along with words that I knew in my head but hadn’t felt in my heart for several years. Eventually a song called “I Love You, Lord” started to play, and for reasons I still don’t really understand, I only got as far as “I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice” before the words caught in my throat and I started to cry. Actually, I started to bawl. A flood of tears washed over me so quickly that I almost wondered where they’d come from; I had grown so accustomed to feeling jaded and hard hearted that the tears totally surprised me.

  It occurred to me that I missed the days when faith seemed simple.

  And I wondered what I’d done to mess it up.

  Theologically I was way off the mark, of course, but it was easy for me to look at the sin and the rebellion and the manipulation in my life and just shrug my shoulders and tell myself that God had given up on me, that we’d had a nice little run for four or five years before I started to disappoint Him in countless ways. Like so many of us tend to do, I’d fallen into the trap of thinking that I carried the weight of the gospel on my shoulders—and then, as I drifted further and further from the One who had actually ordained every single bit of my life, I felt utterly embarrassed that I couldn’t bear a burden that had never been mine to begin with. That kind of thinking sparks a strange, destructive cycle of spiritual defeat, and like a tornado, it picks up everything in its path—guilt, shame, hopes, doubts, fears—before it rips those things to shreds, scatters them across the landscape of our hearts, and somehow convinces us that we’re on our own to pick up the pieces.

  After all, if God really loved us, would He have ever allowed the storm?

  But that afternoon, somewhere between Kemper County and Oktibbeha County, the Lord reminded me that even though “my flesh and my heart may fail . . . God is the strength of my heart and my po
rtion forever” (Psalm 73:26). In all my brokenness I had my own little worship service in Daddy’s Crown Victoria, and it was the sweetest reminder that even though I’d numbed myself to the joys of life in Christ, the Holy Spirit hadn’t left me.

  It probably goes without saying, but I was mighty relieved.

  It’s always good to remember that you aren’t nearly as alone as you fear.

  I would love to tell you that life was one big praise-and-worship chorus after my road trip in the Crown Victoria, but it wasn’t. I still didn’t have real community or true accountability, and I can’t even say I had a genuine desire to turn from “the sin that so easily entangles” (Hebrews 12:1, NIV). I continued to hold tightly to the parts of my life where I didn’t want God to have any say—lest He ask more of me than I was willing to give.

  The illusion of control is a powerful thing.

  It was a couple of weeks before the Eagle was out of the shop, and when I drove back to Myrtlewood, I found that I was a little reluctant to return the Crown Victoria to Daddy. Granted, nobody would have looked at his car and commented on its beauty, but it was sturdy and it was solid, and I knew firsthand that it was a safe place to be if you happened to be caught in a storm.

  As soon as I sat in my car, though, I felt like I was home. The seat belt thingy still didn’t work just right, and I knew it was only a matter of time before the engine overheated. I pushed a few buttons and levers to make sure the air and lights were working, and when I accidentally flipped on the turn signal, I noticed that its delightful, rhythmic chime had taken on a frantic quality, almost like a panicked little bird.

  It was just one more thing to add to the list—and it made me laugh. Every once in a while, I reckon, broken stuff starts to feel downright comfortable.

  The Screamin’ Eagle and I made it back to my apartment without incident. I was grateful for it, but I knew better than to think that all our issues were behind us. History is a mighty good teacher, and that car had proved that it was high maintenance and unreliable over and over again.