Painting Pictures of Egypt

I’ve been feeling a bit disoriented these past few days.  The feeling started, I think, after I discovered the apparent extent of gossip in my ward about me and my wife and I began thinking in more concrete terms about moving out - soon.  This feeling intensified as I met with a potential housemate, and the reality of everything came more sharply into focus. 

During these past days, I have had thoughts about when I will pull away from the house for the last time as a resident, to ever after return as only a visitor; about how I will miss aspects of the life I have known for 20+ years; about how I will adjust to living with friends instead of family.  These thoughts have engendered “peculiar” feelings – feelings that I do not try to shoo away, because I know they are normal and natural – but feelings that nonetheless make me feel uncomfortable, edgy, disoriented.

As I have contemplated these feelings, I have thought repeatedly of a song to which I was recently introduced by a new friend. (Thanks, Kevin.)  Entitled Painting Pictures of Egypt, it describes life experiences that are analogous to the Israelites leaving everything that was familiar to them in Egypt, trying to exercise faith in the promise of a new and better home, all the while wandering, wandering, wandering in the desert wilderness.

I don’t want to leave here

I don’t want to stay

It feels like pinching to me either way

The places I long for the most

Are the places where I’ve been

They are calling after me like a long lost friend

Listening to these lyrics also has brought to mind recent experiences of a friend who has already passed through the looking glass from heterosexual marriage to openly living as a gay man.  For reasons known to himself, he has recently had occasion to feel pangs of regret (?) for the pain his actions may have caused his former wife, causing him (from my vantage point) to experience similar feelings of disorientation.

It’s not about losing faith

It’s not about trust

It’s all about comfortable

When you move so much

The place I was wasn’t perfect

But I had found a way to live

It wasn’t milk or honey

But then neither is this

I have also thought of a young closeted married man who has recently come out to himself, then subsequently to his wife.  His relationship with his wife has been changed; it will never again – regardless of the eventual outcome – be the same as it was before he began his journey.  That realization has brought a sense of disorientation to him as well, along with sadness and pain.

I’ve been painting pictures of Egypt

Leaving out what it lacked

The future seems so hard

And I want to go back

But the places that used to fit me

Cannot hold the things I’ve learned

And those roads closed off to me

While my back was turned

The past is so tangible

I know it by heart

Familiar things are never easy to discard

I was dying for some freedom

But now I hesitate to go

Caught between the promise

And the things I know

Aspects of the past are indeed comfortable, but as we paint pictures of it in our mind, we often tend to leave out things, particularly when the future seems so hard, so uncertain.  The truth, of course, is that we cannot go back, only forward.

Here is Sara Groves singing this plaintive ballad, Painting Pictures of Egypt.