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

by Sophie Hudson

  Raise the fallen, cheer the faint, heal the sick, and lead the blind.

  Just and holy is Thy Name, I am all unrighteousness;

  False and full of sin I am; Thou art full of truth and grace.

  Stunning, huh? It’s worth noting that Charles Wesley wrote “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus,” which Chris Tomlin recorded on a Christmas album a few years ago, so I bet the two of them will totally be bros in heaven.

  Conferences

  Christians love a conference. The conference can be about adoption, preaching, missions, women, college students, marriage—WHATEVER. It doesn’t matter. Plan a conference about any topic that’s related to Christianity, and here’s what the Christians will do: SHOW UP. There are so many conferences, in fact, that it can be difficult to keep them straight. Most of them have names that are either action verbs (MOVE ’15, ENGAGE ’12) or Scripture references (4:13 ’17, 3:20 ’09). I just made all of those up off the top of my head, but I bet one or two of them actually exist.

  (Yep. Just checked. MOVE is a real thing. ENGAGE, surprisingly, is not, so clearly one of you is missing a real opportunity to get a new conference started.)

  CCM

  You’re a Christian now? That’s awesome! Also, you can’t listen to anything except contemporary Christian music from here on out. It’s required. Tomlin told me so.

  Christy Nockels

  Christian women adore Christy Nockels for two specific reasons: (1) her hair is a wonder, and (2) she sings like an angel. She also sings from an incredibly tender, vulnerable place—and women totally pick up on that. In fact, the first time I heard A Grateful People, an album she recorded with her husband under the name Watermark, I cried for approximately four days. I have often thought that if I ever found myself in a room with Amy Grant and Christy Nockels at the same time, I would over-emote to the point that I completely humiliated myself. And it would be so worth it.

  Small group

  Because Sunday school is, like, so 1978.

  Infighting

  Just my opinion, of course, but this is bound to be the enemy’s favorite way of trying to hold the gospel hostage in our churches and denominations. And apparently the enemy’s bait in this particular area is dang tasty because we lunge for that stuff again and again. The Twitter and the Facebook make it possible to take infighting to a whole new level (see #Elect #TotalDepravity #GraceAlone #ChristAlone vs. #SocialJustice #RedLetterChristians #JesusWasPoor).

  Hedge of protection

  The first time I heard somebody pray for this was when we lived in Baton Rouge, and my initial reaction was something along the lines of “Seriously? We’re asking the Lord for some shrubs?” I had no idea it was a phrase from the book of Job. My friend Angie suggests that if you’re ever in a group and unsure about what to pray, USE THIS. It applies to every situation, so basically that means it’s prayer gold.

  Christ follower

  I don’t know how or why we started using this one instead of “Christian,” but I felt like I was just starting to get the hang of “believer” and now we’ve changed terms AGAIN.

  Once you have a solid grasp of the terms, it’s just a matter of time before you’ll be creating the churchiest sentences you ever could have imagined!

  Here are a few examples:

  Since I didn’t want to be a stumbling block, I asked the Lord to provide a hedge of protection around me.

  We watched a Beth Moore DVD in small group the other night, and WOW—that was a fresh word.

  This has been a tough season for me as a Christ follower, so I can’t wait to give Him some praise at the Christy Nockels concert. I hear Tomlin may be there.

  Oh, we are a wacky bunch.

  And you know what else? For a long time I think I held the church’s idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies against it. It was easier to stand on the outside and talk about how hypocritical everybody was than it was to commit to being a part of it. But the truth is that the church will never be perfect, because it’s full of people. It’s inevitable that we’ll mess up and focus on the wrong things and lump ourselves into groups and thrive, to a certain degree, on our differences.

  But Jesus? He is our ever-beautiful Same.

  He calls us and loves us and makes us glad.

  And even when we have to learn a whole new vocabulary that seems to change every five minutes, we can rest in the peace of knowing that there are few things more comforting than looking around a sanctuary (or worship room or storefront or living room or wherever) and feeling, in the company of sinners and saints, like we are completely and utterly at home.

  In His grip,

  Soph

  FOR AS LONG as we’ve known each other, my college friends and I have loved ourselves a girls’ trip. It started when we were at State and would travel to football games on the weekends, and then, once everybody was out in the real world, we’d meet at the beach or get together in Jackson or figure out a way to road-trip to someone’s wedding. The destination was rarely the important part; we just wanted to be in the same place and talk and laugh and quote entire scenes from Raising Arizona, Urban Cowboy, and Coal Miner’s Daughter. As far as I’m concerned, it’s still a combination that makes for a near-perfect weekend.

  The dates of all our trips—and there have been aplenty—blur together in my mind, but there’s one particular beach trip that stands out. I had been married for only a few months when I met the whole crew down in Destin at Elise’s in-laws’ condo, and we laughed so hard that weekend that one of us surely must have ruptured something. Everybody was married by then—most had at least one child—and being able to stay up late and sleep until whenever was such a luxury.

  Well, I mean, I myself didn’t have a child, but I have always been happy to participate in staying up late and sleeping until whenever. I daresay it was a real talent when I was in my twenties.

  That Saturday afternoon we decided to go for a walk on the beach—I believe we were in search of the rumored location of John Grisham’s beach house—and when we didn’t find what we were looking for (can you believe that when John Grisham built his beach house, he didn’t line the beach with signs that said THIS WAY TO JOHN GRISHAM’S BEACH HOUSE?), we turned around to walk back to the condo. Elise and I were at the back of the pack, way too busy running our mouths to trouble ourselves with trying to keep up with the group’s power-walking pace, when all of a sudden the conversation turned serious.

  I must have been feeling reflective, because I’d been thinking a lot that weekend about how life can just turn on a dime. I told Elise how it had been on my mind that up to that point, none of us had experienced any real tragedy. It seemed unusual considering the trials other friends were enduring, but in our little group from college, no one was divorced, no one was sick, everyone’s children and spouses were healthy.

  I said, “You know, it’s strange, really, that none of us have had to deal with anything earth shattering.”

  And Elise, never missing a step, kind of squinted at me and said, “Yeah, that’s true. But it’s bound to happen. You know it’ll happen. Don’t you think? Eventually?”

  I know exactly where we were when she said it. And I also know that part of me wanted to shake her by the shoulders and say, “HEY! WHY ARE WE BEING SO SERIOUS? WE’RE AT THE BEACH! GOOD TIMES!”

  But I was so struck by the truth and the gravity of her words that, well, I didn’t say anything at all.

  When you’re little and hear grown-ups say things like “Time flies,” you don’t really understand it. After all, when you’re seven and desperate for your eighth birthday to roll around, it takes approximately seventeen years for that birthday to arrive. That’s a scientific fact. But after David and I got married—and especially after we moved to Birmingham—I realized that there was some truth to that whole “time flies” cliché. After our little boy, Alex, was born, it seemed like the days became months and the months turned into years faster than ever before, but we were so busy soaking up the joy of life with our lit
tle fella that we hardly even noticed. He turned our hearts and our lives upside down in the most wonderful ways, and before we even thought to blink, he was one.

  Then two.

  Then three.

  It wasn’t very long after Alex’s third birthday when I went to Savannah with some friends, and after I got home and reunited with my people, I did that post-travel bed flop where you’re so elated by the prospect of sleeping on your own mattress that you don’t even crawl under the covers—you just fall on top of them. I immediately fell into a deep, still sleep, so when the phone started to ring around one in the morning, it took a few seconds for me to process that I needed to roll over and answer it.

  I don’t think I’d even said, “Hello?” before I heard Tracey’s voice.

  All she said was, “Sophie,” but I knew she was upset.

  “What is it? Tracey, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  And then she told me. “Something has happened to Paul.”

  I jumped out of bed and walked into the living room, trying not to wake up David or the sleeping young’un upstairs.

  “What do you mean? Something has happened to Paul? Where’s Elise?”

  “She’s at the hospital. They were at the beach, and he fell off a golf cart when they were headed back to the condo after dinner, and now they’ve airlifted him to Pensacola.” I could tell by the sound of Tracey’s voice that she was shaking.

  “AIRLIFTED?” Of all the things Tracey had said, that was the word that stood out the most.

  “Airlifted. And I don’t know much, but it doesn’t sound good. You should call her.”

  “Should we go down there? Should I go to her house? What do we do?”

  “Call her,” Tracey said. “See what she says. Then call me back, okay?”

  Elise answered her phone on the second ring. She wasn’t hysterical, but she was clearly in shock. And after she’d covered the most pertinent details—Paul was on a ventilator with the kind of head injury doctors would expect to see from a high-impact car crash, and while the next thirty-six hours were critical, the prognosis was grim—there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I was going to spend the next day driving to Jackson to meet up with the girls and then head to Pensacola.

  As soon as Elise and I hung up, I called Tracey so we could start to figure out travel plans.

  Our girl needed us. And we wouldn’t dream of letting her down.

  For as long as I’d known them as a couple, Elise and Paul had a way of collecting friends no matter where they were. They had both stayed close to folks from high school and college, and after they married, they made friends through church, their neighborhood, their boys’ schools, tennis, travel, whatever. I can think of at least ten couples that would say Elise and Paul were their very best couple friends—and they were. Somehow they made room for everybody and managed to spend time with lots of different people without making anyone feel excluded. It was part of what made them so special as a couple.

  (I can promise you Elise rolled her eyes when she read that.)

  (But I don’t care.)

  (It’s true.)

  So after I arrived in Jackson, Tracey, Katy, Wendi, and I were trying to get organized for the next leg of the trip to Pensacola (and wishing that Marion weren’t with family in another state—because we knew how desperately she wanted to be with us). Another group of friends was cleaning Elise’s house, washing her boys’ clothes, and getting everything ready for when they came home. There was a different group of friends who were organizing meals and stocking Elise’s refrigerator, making sure to fill up the old refrigerator in her garage with carton after carton of her beloved Diet Dr Pepper. Everyone we talked to, it seemed, knew them and loved them and wanted to help, and if I live to be one hundred, I don’t know if I’ll ever see a community rally around a family the way Elise and Paul’s friends rallied around them. It was a sight to behold.

  I’d spent most of the drive from Birmingham to Jackson getting updates on Paul’s condition, but it was only after I got to Wendi’s house that I found out exactly how dire the situation was. In fact, we were just minutes from leaving for Pensacola when we found out that Paul wasn’t going to make it. The doctors had told Elise that Paul had actually suffered an aneurysm, which was what caused him to fall, and he had no chance for survival once they took him off the ventilator.

  The news was almost inconceivable.

  Honestly, there are days even now when I think it can’t possibly be.

  Since Paul was an organ donor, the folks at the hospital were working to identify and coordinate transplant needs, so it was important to Elise that Paul stay on the ventilator until those details were ironed out. The fact that several people would live as a result of Paul’s death was an enormous comfort to her, and she reminded us of that several times when we talked on the phone.

  Needless to say, our hearts were mighty heavy as we left Jackson and began our trip down Highway 49.

  By the time we got to the hospital that Friday night, it was close to ten o’clock. Elise met us in the parking lot, and while I’d told myself over and over again that I needed to be sure to say something thoughtful and appropriate when I saw her, I totally failed and blurted out something awkward like “Fancy meeting you here” when she walked over to hug our necks. She actually started to laugh, which was a very good thing indeed, especially since it kept the rest of us from crying. We walked into the hospital and took an elevator up to the floor where Elise’s and Paul’s families had been hanging out for most of the day.

  It was surreal to see everybody in that context; we were used to running into one another at football games and weddings and birthday parties, but a matchbox-size, windowless waiting room was new territory for all of us. For about half an hour we sat around and made quiet, idle conversation about kids and work while Elise went over some final arrangements with the hospital staff. As strange as it may sound, we were all genuinely happy to see each other—just not under those circumstances.

  Oh, Lord, have mercy. Never under those circumstances.

  After she finished talking to the hospital folks, Elise walked back to the waiting room, and she’d barely made it through the door before her mama, Cindy, wrapped her arms around Elise’s shoulders and pulled her close. We all stood in silence for several seconds, and then Elise’s daddy, Frank, said, “Hey. I’ve got it. How about we all go into Paul’s room and pray?”

  Tracey, Wendi, Katy, and I looked at Elise to see if she was okay with the idea. After all, she only had about an hour left with her sweet husband, and we didn’t want to take away from a second of it.

  “I think that’s great,” she answered. “And I want y’all to see him. Are y’all okay with seeing him?”

  We most certainly were.

  Over the course of the almost twenty years I’d known Paul, I’d seen him plow into the guard walls at roller-skating rinks, cannonball into pools, rock his sweet baby boys, imitate some impressive WWF moves, laugh until tears ran down his face, scream nonstop on an epic mud-riding expedition, change diapers, smooch his bride, crank up some classic rock, sing at the top of his lungs, and dance his way out of his jacket and tie at who knows how many wedding receptions.

  But I don’t think I’d ever seen him perfectly still.

  That was the first thing I noticed when we walked in his hospital room.

  Elise immediately walked to the end of his bed and kissed his face, just like she’d done countless times before. She stroked his cheek and rubbed his arm and held his hand. If we’d been sitting in their living room, she would have acted the exact same way. And as sad as everything had been up to that point—as tragic as his accident was—the realization that Elise wouldn’t be able to hold his hand anymore was the thing that nearly sent me right over the emotional edge. She’d been holding that hand for nineteen years, even when she was so mad at him that she couldn’t see straight. Seeing Elise and Paul side by side—well, that’s how things were supposed to be. The thought of her having to
move forward without him was just strange and sad and wrong.

  Gradually we started to talk about some of our favorite memories; we talked about how Paul had cried all the way through their wedding, how he’d fallen to his knees and sobbed when he was overwhelmed by the blessing of his first baby boy, and how he had to be—HAD TO BE—the first one on the dance floor whenever live music was playing. We talked about how he never visited a Chinese buffet without consuming a plate of food, then looking around the table and saying, “DING, DING—ROUND TWO” before he went back for “refills.” We talked about his love for Hawaiian shirts and the fact that he had the fashion sense of a color-blind retiree.

  We laughed and we cried for about fifteen minutes as family members and friends gathered in the room, and after Elise’s daddy asked us to circle up and hold hands, we prayed. It was such a sacred, holy moment that I’m almost reluctant to write about it, so I’ll just say this. One of the songs at Elise and Paul’s wedding was “Surely the Presence,” and while it was absolutely beautiful on their wedding day, it would have been even more appropriate as we stood around Paul’s bed.

  Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place.

  I can feel His mighty power and His grace. . . .

  The Holy Spirit met us in a hospital room in Pensacola, Florida, that night.

  I don’t imagine that any of us will ever forget it.

  I think there’s a point when you’re watching someone you love go through something so unthinkable and so painful that words just stop. I mean, you can only express how sorry you are so many times before you run the risk of having the Hallmark crown imprinted on your head and then finding yourself stuck in one of those little slots on the greeting-card aisle at Walgreens. At some point you have to talk about something besides the fact that you’re sorry and that you’ll do whatever you can.

  So as much as we cried in the days that followed Paul’s death, we laughed just as much—often at the most inappropriate times. In fact, after we finished praying that night in Paul’s hospital room, we were still taking in the holiness of the moment, lingering for just a few more precious minutes, when Cindy asked Elise a question in the softest whisper imaginable.