Come with me, back to my Midwest church girl roots with a visit to South Park Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. 
Loud music bounced wildly off the dark wood panels of a north side Chicago Irish pub. Thirty years after high school graduation, we milled around tall bar tables, leaned in close and shouted catch-up questions to each other above the din. We are a room full of 40-somethings. What are you doing now? Where do you live? How many kids do you have?
High school reunions are a one-night carnival mirror for faces of one age. Hello, classmates of 1984. Look around. This is what you look like. This is who you are. This is who you were. This is who you are becoming.
Before I gathered courage to join the reunion, I took a drive around my hometown. Park Ridge, Illinois sits on a northwest edge of Chicago, on grids of long mature tree-lined streets and sidewalks. Over the years, new homes slowly have replaced many old neighborhood houses. But the recognizable landmarks remain.
I drove past the simple concrete street markers with vertical green name plates — Vine, Crescent, Courtland or Prospect. I passed my girlfirend’s bedroom window, my boyfriend’s backyard, tidy back alleys, the red and white marquis of Pickwick Theater and the stadium lights on the football field at Maine South High School. The smell of airplane exhaust from O’Hare Airport mixed with fresh cut lawn grass made me feel like I should be walking to school with a flute case under my arm. On that park swing, I felt six. By that grocery store, I felt thirteen. Under that elm tree, I felt twenty. And around the corner, I found church.
The white steeple and tall colonial windows of South Park Church were extensions of my family home. A half mile apart, I inhabited both places almost equally. I used to know every inch, every hallway, closet, baptismal, bathroom and balcony. I colored pages in Sunday School rooms, memorized Pioneer Girl verses in Fellowship Hall, shouted with the high schoolers in the gym, and walked down the sanctuary aisle on my wedding day.
The car engine went quiet at the curb. I sat and stared at the brick structure and felt the same sensation you feel seconds before the front door swings opens and the family dog comes running. Except, nobody was home. The church was undergoing massive renovation. The parking lot was a scrabbled surface. Plywood covered windows. Dirt and dumpsters marked the outline of massive upgrades to the tired old building. Yellow tape and temporary fences served as safety barriers to redirect pedestrians. I stood before a work in progress.
This is who you were.
This is who you are.
The ripped-up church construction felt like a brick and mortar picture of my interior world. The organ and pews are gone; the middle of the building demolished and rebuilt, the entry reconfigured. My faith is under a similar renovation. For a while now, I’ve been among the scattered — the ones who once called themselves ‘evangelical’ but currently claim no church home. I am untethered from any one particular established faith community. And somedays it feels like a jumble of familiar structures and demolition. There at the curb, I didn’t know which door to use to access the sanctuary that was once the living room of my youth.
That said, somewhere deep in the middle of rising scaffolds, I still have hope. It doesn’t look exactly the same anymore I still have a foundation.
Time to go. I snapped a couple pictures of the church renovation to send my brother and sisters and headed over to meet up with all the other kids who were born in 1966. And I got to thinking. No matter how the world changes, no matter where we wander or how we can’t seem to find the front door, somewhere deep in the middle of rising scaffolds I hear it, feel it, know the way like the concrete markers on every corner of my childhood. In the depths of my soul I feel a boom and resonance across time, for me, for you.
“I AM.”
אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה