Somewhere in Middle America

A weekend in Omaha for a wedding, old friends, and the pursuit of thin places.

The Irish have always expressed the intersection of the divine and the natural world, the places where we feel more closely connected to the spiritual world, as “thin places.” I wasn’t sure what to expect this past week when I traveled to Omaha for a wedding of an old friend’s son, but what I found was just such a thin spot.

Twenty-five years ago, Omaha was another stop for gas on my way to Chicago. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be there; it was that in those days, getting to where I was going was more important than what was on the journey. Omaha was just another Loaf n’ Jug in the thousands of miles I was covering to get to the next concert or home base. Chicago and Minneapolis were the center of my musical life then. One was a trip past Des Moines, and one was a turn north in that town. Either way, Omaha was just a convenient spot for gas or a quick bite to eat.

Those years in Chicago were the most formative ones of my life. I had met a group of guys at bible college, and they lived in Batavia. It was a perfect American suburb. A great downtown, sleepy meandering cul-de-sac streets, and a youth group that was always willing to host my band for the kickoff of the touring season. The guys who lived there became my best friends. We have seen every significant moment of our adult lives together. We were there for each other's weddings. We have witnessed the birth of our children. Traveled together. We have been on the other end of a phone call about the passing of a parent. No moment of the last twenty-five years, of any significance, has not been surrounded by this friendship. So, when Matt called last fall to tell us his son was getting married, we all figured out how to get to Omaha this past weekend. We wouldn’t dare miss it. The lives of our kids are incredibly important to each of us. Every summer, when we take our annual guys fishing trip, most of what we talk about in the serious moments is how our kids are doing. We have all held one another’s children in our arms. We’ve been there for the parental meltdowns of exhaustion that come from sleepless nights after coming home from the hospital. We have stood by one another as we celebrated their successes. Our kids know each of us as their dad’s best friend. It’s admittedly unique in our maximalist culture. We have, albeit from a distance, been integrated into the lives of one another’s families. Our wives travel together. We have taken countless family vacations to Yellowstone, Williamsburg, or the Denver Zoo. This is a deep and profound friendship. I recognize it every time we are together, and for as long as I live, I will never take it for granted.

A few of us live in Colorado, and the rest live in either Chicago or Wisconsin, so Omaha was the perfect halfway point for all of us. It’s also just close enough to debate whether to fly or drive. Our friend, who loves long runs but loathes long drives, decided to fly. The rest of the Colorado crew decided to drive. I love the road trip. There is something so profound about seeing America from the road. It gives me a perspective about our country and about my own smallness that is beautiful. In the front seat of a car, the sky is bigger, the landscape more profound. It’s a different experience. Less convenient for sure, but also something much more in line with an older age. The summers on the interstate or the highway have always seemed very American to me. Truck stops and bad gas station food, accompanied by incredible selections of music from the person riding shotgun and a myriad of Points of Interest that have a siren’s call, all combine to make the road trip the perfect American experience.

We picked up our friends at 6 a.m. on Thursday with hot cups of coffee and shopping bags filled with great snacks. We headed east, and by mid-morning, we were in eastern Colorado. My heart was suddenly struck by the passing of time. This once-familiar drive had faded from my memory. I used to be able to do all of it without the map. My stash of Gazetteer Atlases in the back pocket of the front seat never came out for my trip to Chicago. I knew the route like the back of my hand. But as we crossed into Sterling, Colorado, high above on the bluff overlooking the South Platte, I realized the roadways had become foggy in my memory. I didn’t recognize where we were. The town had grown, and the roads had realigned. The coffee shop from all those years ago was gone — replaced by the predictable chains of the American heartland landscape. The sky was still as beautiful as I remembered it. Rain walls and Toy Story clouds pressed hard against the blue sky of the early day, and the residue of spring green on the dryland wheat fields. Its holiness hit me. Life had moved on from my youth. And while I still believe myself to be twenty-five, the reality of the morning sky reminded me that life is finite. No amount of money in a bank account, or status in a job or town, can arrest the seconds from racing past. We are all about to be forgotten, and there will be no point of interest on a highway to commemorate our lives. That is strangely refreshing. The pressure to produce is self-induced and self-indulgent. My great-great-grandkids will know nothing of me other than what photos and videos my kids have passed on to their children and their children’s children. I will be a clip, a reel, or some other futuristic holographic assemblage of ones and zeros that replicates who I was, but there will be no digital ability to replicate what my human experiences were as I drove across the Nebraska plain, and to my great relief, there will be no monument for it.

Omaha came quickly. We arrived at our hotel in the early afternoon and settled in. All of the events for the weekend were either at the hotel or within a short distance of it. We found our friends whose son was getting married and grabbed a bite to eat with them at a restaurant down the street. I asked the father how he was doing. There was a solemnity in his face. Not sadness or fear, but a quiet recognition that something new is about to happen. He answered honestly. “Good, but there are a lot of emotions in this deal.”

I know that answer well. My own family is at the end of its time under my roof. My son is also getting married next month. So many endings. So many beginnings. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I feel lost in it. I have had a singular focus for twenty-plus years. Raise my children. Provide for their needs. I have worked at things for years that have simply been to pay the bills. They aren’t jobs that provide a thrill or a mental sense of accomplishment. They are pragmatic, as most fathers know, for the sake of those around them. Somehow, though, what seems to be coming feels like something dramatically different than the last twenty years of life.

We ran some errands with the father of the groom, told our usual jokes and old dumb stories, and made reference to the fact that each of our weddings didn’t feel like they were all that long ago, but there was something different about this moment. A friend's son is now at the stage of life we were at when we met. That means time has moved on, and, unbeknownst to us, we have moved with it. We stopped by with some groceries for the groomsmen at their Airbnb, and we made the rounds being introduced to them. I was struck by how well my friend had raised his son. This young man, whom I can vividly remember holding in my arms as I sat on the couch in his parents’ home in St. Charles, was demonstrating the kindness and grace to his friends, that we all know so deeply as friends of one another. That small legacy had been passed on to him. He watched us as we lived life together, recognized its profound benefits, and chose, in his own life, to make it a centerpiece of his growing up.

Later that evening, there was the traditional rehearsal and a welcome dinner for guests. Our group of friends was seated together at the same table. Perhaps it was the low light, or the emotions of what I felt was coming, but there was a strange flickering between our current moment and our youth. It was almost as if I could see us each at our own weddings, but glitching back to the current versions of ourselves. We are clearly older. My wrinkles and grey hair in my beard are just the outward indicia of what has happened. We each have had our own inward journeys too. No marriage has come through unscathed by the demands and toil of this hyper-paced American life. We have lived through the troubled moments of raising kids, the crumbling of churches we chose to serve, and our own addictions. Every one of those hardships, another chink in the armor. We wear it on our faces now, but we're all somehow sitting there at the table together, celebrating this new rite of passage for one of our own.

I knew something had shifted as I sat there. I felt it. Life is fading, and while I hope I have many more days ahead, I know that, by the statistics of the average human life, I have far fewer days ahead than I have already lived. That evening at the table, it came as clearly to me as light through a stained-glass window. The work I have been assigned by the divine, and not the vocational nonsense that I do to keep numbers in a checking account, is what these next years will be about. Watching my kids get married, grandkids arrive, and watching my friends live through the same. Getting that dreaded call that one of us has gone on to be with the Lord, or that one of our wives is sick and needs desperate intervention, all are coming. So it changes how I must live in the time I have left. I know that there is an end now. The vigor of youth and far-off horizons have changed. It makes me so thankful for the good men and women who have been grafted into my soul. It makes me want to pursue those friendships further.

In my sleepless nights, which have become much more frequent in recent years, I have felt a desire to run away from the moment. To bury myself in distractions or work so as not to be confronted with the hard reality of the change. But what I have experienced is too rich to fade into isolation. I have to lean into this moment and into my friends and family to complete the work the divine has given me. Perhaps it was the vows or the laughter around a table filled with old friends, but clarity seems to be coalescing around living life well. Weddings remind us of our youth. They bring clarity to what God has designed for the human experience. Leaving and leaning into life's richness is how the partnership is designed. I saw that in the aging faces of my friends. It’s hard to say how many walks I have left into the Twin Buttes or the Powder River, but being together again, somewhere in the middle of America, made me realize that what I have been given is a gift not to be wasted.

Jesus’ first miracle was at a wedding. They are significant in the human experience. They signify the transition from one state of life to another. Jesus turned water into wine. He changed the very essence of what was in the barrels. Perhaps that’s what we all witness at a wedding. The change of nature. The change of father and son, to something new. The change from young friends to old ones.

“Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.”

They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”

What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”

What happened in Omaha was a very in-my-face reminder of my own mortality, and it strangely called me to a deeper belief in things eternal. In my youth, I was always chasing the destination as quickly as I could. Get there, be first, get the most, ignore the roadside stops; gas and go, I used to say. The wedding reminds me that the path to the destination is more important. The final stop is inevitable. The meandering, the transitions, and encounters along the way are what make life worth living.