St. Augustine, Florida was the first place that I came to learn that the world is a much bigger place than what I’d been exposed to growing up in Port Wentworth, Georgia. America’s oldest city with its Spanish architecture, narrow streets and ancient fort made me realize that the world is much more than the Sugar Refinery and Continental Can Company.
I’ve been to the old city countless times and always enjoy being there. So yesterday, mainly because I wanted to go, Mom, Jeremy, Marie, and Chelsea all loaded into the car and we drove an hour to get there. After finding a parking place on the main street, we walked to the Mill Top Tavern, one of my holy places.
With an incredible view of the old city, the fort and the river, the Mill Top also has live music throughout most of the day. So we got an outdoor table on the deck and settled in for a few hours of salt air and acoustic music. We told stories and laughed and snapped photographs of each other.
St. Augustine runs in the blood of my kids, my close friends whom I’ve drug there and most anyone else who hangs around me for very long. And the Mill Top is ground zero for it all.
Once, Chelsea, Julie, and Austin and I went on a ghost tour of the city. The tour guide wasn’t especially good and when she learned that we were from Savannah, she said, “Well, Savannah is the most haunted city in the United States. St. Augustine is the second most haunted.”
“Get an afterlife!” Austin told her.
Chelsea told this story again yesterday and we laughed another time.
This morning I sit watching the sun rise over the ocean, palm trees silhouetted in the dark, and a black sky sprinkled with stars, begins to be invaded by pinks and purples. God is giving us another day to do with whatever we choose to do. Every day is the chance to start over or try again. Whatever life we had yesterday can either continue or we begin a new life after that one.
That’s what I’m doing. Building an afterlife that is much different from the one that I had last year. Like everyone, I’ve already lived several lives. I was a kid in Port Wentworth who became an adult and left that life.
In college it was another life with new friends from different places and then did it again when I went to Seminary. Children were born and a family was created. A career was born in an old worn out inner-city church. I liked this life very much but it came to an end.
Then I left that life for the one on Tybee Island, at Union Mission, kids left, success came, books were written, a love died and another was born and there was happiness. This had been a happier and more fulfilling life than anything before! But now that life has ended too.
What happens now? The black sky is now blue. The palm tree dances in the breeze. For the first time I am living life alone. The love that I’d believed in is gone. And I have stopped the carnival as I take stock of everything that comprises my life right now --- who I was and who I want to be moving forward.
I find myself after those other lives that I’ve lived. It is getting closer to the time that I embrace a new one that I believe will be happier and more fulfilling still!
