Jacksonville

Poster child suburban river town, sunrises and eastern tides flowing through the North Florida finance buildings as it did in the days of the Timuquan. Half-Georgia, half-Florida, we are both hick and intellectual, hunter and socialite, rock musician (this is the birthplace of Lynyrd Skynyrd, after all) and symphony-lover. We are dyed-in-the-wool Republicans and quieter, moderate Democrats. We are beach bums and fisherpeople, rowers and Frisbee players. We have a professional football team, but the streets these days are colored with Gator blue and orange, if not because we love the team, then in honor of Tim Tebow, our native son. We are Navy-types who yearn for a new aircraft carrier to bring prestige, and a hundred thousand people, to the city. We are the home of silent movies, of a disparate population of immigrants old and new, legal and illegal, spread over so vast a terrain you don’t have to bump into anybody you don’t mean to. We are the Hollywood of 1920s silent movies, where Colin Farrell came to fame (in Tigerland, check it out), and Limp Bizkit and Shinedown played their first shows. We are the gateway to Florida, our old buildings consumed in the Great Fire, our new ones tearing down and down again as we spread more and more outward. It is a car city, it is a boat city, it was the railway city, before Henry Flagler decided to build the railways further down Florida’s jungle peninsula and take our business to Tampa, Orlando, Miami, etc.

We are an old city of impressive beachfronts and nice restaurants. We are a young city with Art Walk and Riverside and other pleas to get young people out and together. We are a family city, with the space, the cost, the comfortable middle-classness, some of the best schools in America, not too far away from the Northside’s violence and schools that are some of the worst. We are a supermarket city, we are a dog city, and though we are not a biking city, all of the bikers that shoot by will gladly raise their hands back at you in a kind, reciprocal salutation.

I always feel challenged when writing here. In fact, though my time in Europe is done, and the time on the bike – officially, as we set the country ablaze on two wheels – is yet to come, and the fact that I can use the phone, and am now again used to its familiar grip on my soul (seriously, sometimes we think we feel it ring to realize we aren’t even carrying our phones), and that I can access the bank, and make money, and send less-expensive postcards, all of this is reality, but nonetheless, Jacksonville is one of the hardest parts of my trip. In earlier travels it has been a struggle of redefinition, the idea that a prophet (to use a biblical allusion) is not welcome in his own town. This is no longer the case. The play has been put on, people have seen it; people understand and support that passion, even if they don’t really get it. Before it’s been helping the parents. The parents are helped: I enjoy painting the deck Navajo white and scrubbing faucets untarnished and sweating unduly in the Florida sun.

This time it is the dichotomous challenge of having much to do, and having little to do. I am full up on work, gracious for any support that friends can give on Bike and Build, pouring into the unknowns of financing and living within graduate school, novelizing the play so that I can look at the needed changes with new eyes, rather than the ones who created a number of its verses four years ago. Yet, I cannot help but notice that J-ville lacks the central-ness of DC, the idea that if you are in DuPont Circle, you are in the middle of something, a cross-section of cultures; or, more simply, the downtown of any European city, where people come to stroll, play checkers, listen to music, see what’s going on. We have these events in Jacksonville, but they are so far away. I can go to the St. Johns Town Center – the “Town Center” concept basically designed so a mall can create the “city centre” feel that we have mostly lost in suburbia – but it takes a while. Some crave this disparate-ness, for the solitude of a plot of land and space, but this is not me, quite possibly has never been me.

So the challenge becomes, how to feel inspired in a place that seems, on many levels, uninspiring? Certainly we all face this in our day-to-day lives, even in places that we love. A place, even a place with Smithsonian Museums, does not alone make us inspired, excited people. I’m tying this on Word, but with a picture of our Bible Group from Taizé in the background – I’ll copy it later to put online – but for now I gaze into the faces of loved ones, remembering now to thank God for how far the Father/Mother has brought me, and that I’m here because I need to be here, in a spread-out city that grows families, in a grand, old house needing minor repair, not here for myself, but to serve, as it has been all year, just this time to serve in a place I know well, with parents’ whose eyes – like yours -- light up like hummingbirds through no doing of our own, overjoyed simply in our being there.