Two months into the first round of 2020 quarantines, my friend Lauren let Dan and I live in her apartment in Evanston. It was May, and she had been quarantining with her parents since mid-March. When I told her that Dan and I were struggling a bit with being stuck in a one-bedroom apartment with no outdoor space, she suggested we borrow hers for a while.

“I just wish we had an office and a deck,” I said, “and maybe in-unit laundry.”

“Well, I have all of those things!” Lauren said.

And so… at the end of April… we packed up our things (houseplants and coffee maker included) and headed north to Evanston.

Evanston is the very first suburb you hit if you were to drive north outside the city of Chicago. It’s quiet-ish, the train still runs up here, it’s right beside the lake, and Dan and I were actually accustomed to spending quite a bit of time up there before quarantine began.

All of our therapists are up there (yes...I said all— his counselor, my counselor, and our marriage counselor), and we were known to grab a drink at Smylie Brothers before appointments or stay late for dinner. If the appointments were on Saturdays, we might get coffee at Peet’s (or Starbucks or Cupitol or Colectivo!) or have brunch at Le Peep.

The art studio where I sometimes take classes is located in Evanston, and one of my very last friend-dates before COVID shutdowns was with Lauren at a taco shop called La Principal (Lauren — if you’re reading, how could we have known!?!? We should have stayed for one more marg!).

The lighthouse beach where Dan and I had our first serious conversation about marriage timelines is even located in Evanston. We went up there on an unseasonably warm Saturday in October 2014. We sat in the sand and made our plans, ending the conversation by saying, “I promise to be married to you by next October.”

And then we shook hands because we’re weird.

We really love Evanston, and it was such an unexpected treat to spend the month up there, embracing the quieter pace that exists just outside Chicago city limits.

enjoying the quarantine spring on Lauren’s balcony

As we prepared to go back home at the end of May, I couldn’t help but think about change, much as I’m sure you’re thinking about it right now.

What all has changed? What is going to change? How have I changed? What will I allow to change?

If you’re anything like me, you tend to resist change, at least to some degree. Even good change can be uncomfortable. It requires a letting go, a grief of sorts, an acceptance that some things will not be known until you move through them. And if you’re not intentional about acknowledging change, it can so be easy to just stuff that grief and press on with business as usual.

But when I read about people wanting to get back to life as normal, that, too, feels jarring and even a bit wrong. There are plenty of things about my own life that I don’t really want to go back to. I don’t want to go back to believing my value is based on what I’m able to achieve, or to watching tv right up until my “bedtime” and then falling asleep later, still, because I decided to scroll through my phone for half an hour.

Prior to quarantine, I would often think about how I wanted to developing better bedtime routines — be in bed by 10pm and then spend five or so minutes journaling before I fell asleep. For whatever reason, I could never will myself to do this.

Yet, in the quieter evenings of quarantine, that routine has happened. Maybe it’s because I save 30 minutes each evening by not having to commute. Maybe it’s because Dan was in class for many nights between January and June and I had nothing better to do. Or maybe it’s because this unexpected reset carved a path toward some of the things I really wanted in the first place.

Whatever it was, I’m glad it happened, and I’d like for it to stay this way.

Communally, I don’t want to go back to pretending like what we do doesn’t affect people all across our nation and the world. I don’t want to go back to thinking that America is perfect and has it all figured out and doesn’t need to collaborate with anyone else. I don’t want to go back to acting like we each bear no responsibility to anyone else or any other thing in this world. We are all connected, and to me, that’s beautiful, even if it’s a little daunting.

I’ve been meditating on a passage of scripture found in Ephesians 3 for quite some time now:

"For this reason I kneel before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name… And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge— that you may be filled to the measure with all the fullness of God."

When you really sit down and think about it, a love like that is terrifying. It’s big. It lets a lot of people in. And the more people it welcomes in, the more it begs me to love like Jesus — as a servant who thinks of others as better than himself. A love like that expands, asking me to expand, surrendering to God with a resounding ‘yes!’ even when his expansive love surpasses my ability to comprehend.

This kind of love is wild, but it’s exactly the kind of life and the kind of love I want to walk back into. It’s the kind of change I would like to unfold — one of expansive love and surrender, of curiosity over judgement, of grace and freedom and love over absolutely everything else.

The only question is, will I let it? Can I let it? Will you and I allow this kind of change to come?

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see…

Change and a New Year's Wish