I Remember...

I'm sitting at the computer in the morning, sending out email (still can't receive!) and fixing a computer calendar to keep me out of deadline trouble. Outside the sun is shining white through a thick haze of clouds. The movement of snowflakes, gently whirling, catches my eye - tiny spots of white against corrugated metal roofs, faraway streets and apartment buildings, looking gray against the bright sky.

So many things to do - prayer requests to send out, laundry to do, dishes to wash, Japanese homework, dishes to wash, Bible study homework, emails to Japanese...

But for now I can't move, rooted to my spot by the window. I just tuned in to an American Christian radio station online for the first time as I work, and the memories that flooded back caught me by surprise. I hear songs I knew, songs (in beautiful, understandable English!), songs that kept my spirits high in days that are now obscure, songs that threaded together my life and my faith.

I can see myself in college at Gardner-Webb, listening to my friend's new CD at her nearby house. "I can't wait to be in heaven," she said after one song. Me, too. The uncertainties and questions, endless days, stretched out like the lonely North Carolina highway near her front door. If someone had told me I'd listen to that same song from an apartment in north Japan, I wouldn't have believed.

But now...

The guitar in one song reminds me of one long summer internship in Atlanta, parking my car in the shade of oak trees in front of an intimidating white building. I spent my mornings in the office learning how to lay out a newspaper page and proofread news text.

Another song propels me just a few months back, driving through mazes of concrete curves and high rises in Richmond, radio on. Driving to work with half-written articles and reporters notebooks covering my desk, racing home with trembling joy on Friday afternoons to meet the crowd that would pack into my living room for Bible study, driving to VCU for Wednesday Coffee Hour with international students, heading into town on lunch break to meet Indians, Brazilians, or a gas station poet.

The snow is barely falling now. The online radio is still playing, and I dread turning it off. Dishes are waiting. My Japanese text books are gathering dust on my shelf.

I can't help but wonder if I will look back one day as I hear a song and think of my city.