Hannah Brencher - Come Matter Here: Your Invitation to Be Here in a Getting There World

CONTENTS

I spent the last hours of 2013 sitting on the floor of my friends New York City apartment surrounded by pictures of tiny copper teakettles. It had become a tradition for a bunch of friends to gather on the Upper West Side on the afternoon of New Years Eve and make vision boards for the year ahead. We haul in magazines weve saved throughout the year and spend a few hours reflecting and dreaming up what we hope to make happen in the new year.

December 31 has always been my favorite day of the year. I start celebrating early in the morning and let the festivities of a New Year drag on until about the middle of March. I think theres something really beautiful about the last day of the year. Theres an anticipation hanging in the air, an infectious energy buzzing around because on this dayand sometimes only on this one day out of 365people genuinely believe they can do better. They can be better.

The two years before this one, my vision boards were always full of images and words placed strategically to make me want to hustle, move, and shake up the world. There would be multiple suitcases and verbs like RUN or GO spread out across the board. I dont think theres anything wrong with wanting to do something that matters, but I do think its dangerous to center all our decisions around being enough for the world.

This year, I couldnt stop reaching for the home and living magazines. I couldnt explain why my hands kept grabbing for them or why I kept ripping out pictures of dishes. And teacups. And chairs. And adorable office spaces. And white linens.

It looks like I am building a home this year, I announced to my friends around the room, all hunched over their own pieces of poster board. I didnt even think I wanted this.

A home seemed out of place in my current lifestyle. Id made a lot of things happen in the last year. Id contracted and written a book. Id traveled around the country giving talks to big audiences. I had pieces of my writing go viral. I was doing everything I thought I was supposed to be doing. This was the stuff the world told me mattered. This was the stuff people always wanted to talk about, how they could climb higher too.

Yet the more I did, the more restless I found myself. I kept thinking if I could just fill this growing hole inside me with something greater, then I would feel full. It was always one big then, but never anything I actually arrived at. I was starting to wonder if the hole would ever be filled, or if there was another road I wasnt taking yet toward something totally different but something completely better.

When you only focus on the life you project to the world, you start living halfheartedly. It becomes nearly impossible to be content with the life you have. Instead, you run the rat race of always chasing after that next thing to temporarily fill you or allow you to impress people a little longer.

I picked up another magazine and began flipping through the contents. I opened to a two-page spread with the words SWEET GEORGIA MAY plastered in big white letters across it.

Georgia. May. There was another reminder, just like the dozen or so I had gotten in the last few months since I made the decision to move to Georgia that coming May. I was in the process of writing my first book, and I knew it would be completed by May. It was my third year of working for myself. Id built a steady income doing freelance writing, ghostwriting, and speaking at colleges and conferences. I had nothing tying me to one specific place on the map. For some people, that would be the ultimate adventure. This reality terrified me. I never thought Id be someone to pick up and move to a new place.

Atlanta seems like a really random place to want to move to. In actuality, I became friends with a girl named Eryn, who lived just outside of Atlanta. We technically met in person once before in New York City, but neither of us could recall it, so I say the first time we really spoke was over the phone after Eryn asked if we could connect. We were both young women hustling to make the world better through small businesses, and she expressed how lonely that could sometimes be. I knew the feeling, so I jumped at the chance to talk with her.

By the end of the conversation, Eryn was inviting me to visit the South for the first time. I dont know if she expected me to take her up on the offer, but I booked the plane ticket the next week and flew into Atlanta a few months later. It was there, throughout a whole week with her, that I felt a real urgency to be there. I wanted to stay longer. I wanted to meet more people. I wanted to figure out if I belonged in this place, if I could build a life here.

That became the first of many trips to Georgia, one of them being a road trip with a girl who wasnt my friend before the road trip. We met at a party in Connecticut and bonded over our love for Georgia and sweet tea. Shed grown up in Georgia, and she mentioned that her grandmother still lived there, in a wooded cabin in the northern mountains. By the end of the night, wed planned a road trip to go visit Grandma.

Our plans came together so suddenly that I ended up texting her the night before the trip and asking, So wait, are we really going?

A few hours later, before the sun came up, we packed up her car and made the fourteen-hour journey down southern highways. We brought a banjo to sing songs along the way, though neither of us knew how to actually play the instrument. We tacked a few hours on to our road trip, stopping at every cheesy attraction plastered on the billboards.

We stayed with her grandmother in the woods and got adopted by her Southern lake family for the Fourth of July weekend. This feeling of being welcomed in and wanted enveloped me tighter than the Georgia humidity, and I felt home. We rode around the Atlanta interstates, wearing snapbacks and flip-flops, talking to Southern guys on Tinder, asking ourselves if we could really live here. Atlanta and her people validated this strong voice in my head that always wanted the courage to be able to say, There is a place for you here. You belong in places that know your name and places that dont yet know youre coming for them.

I used to think you needed to leave if you wanted to change your life or try something different. I thought geography could heal the mess that comes from being humanlike a clean slate. We all want different things that keep us coming and going and staying and living.

__________

I used to say I moved to Atlanta because God told me to move there. I think we need to be really careful when we say, God told me to..., because, a lot of times, we equate our own feelings about a situation with requests that God makes to us. Just because I feel something may not mean God is confirming it. I think it is a lifelong quest to differentiate our feelings from the plans of God.

Even with the hope that I would end up back in Atlanta, it wasnt enough for me to pack my suitcase and just go. I was struck with a fear of making a wrong move. This fear has been a plaguing factor in my young adult life. I think we invest crazy amounts of energy into whether or not we are supposed to do something. I have a friend named Luke who says we waste too much time waiting for direction from God. We run around frantically asking for signs. We act as though the apocalypse is upon us. I dont think it matters so much if you cant figure out whether or not God wanted you to break up with that person, whether or not God wanted you in that city. Luke says we are all waiting for some big revealand what if its not some big reveal? What if its just a lot of work and choices, the slow, slow work of building the muscle of discernment?