What is a Green Street?
If you’re a believer, like me, you’ve probably noticed a common theme in the bible: the wilderness. We often hear messages preached about seasons of wilderness, like losing a loved one, a job, or the ability to hear God’s voice. Or suffering a sports injury or having a post-grad internship fall through or losing all your time to diapers, tantrums, and night-time parenting when a third little one joins the family.
When we hit these roadblocks, it’s easy to let disappointment claim the season as a waste. Yet, biblically, the wilderness was a safe haven… filled with God’s provision and rest. The Israelites were well-fed in the desert; their meals literally dropped from the sky. Moses’s wilderness time not only taught him shepherding but gave him a wife and new family. And Paul’s time in prison, yes, even there, allowed him the time and space to craft timeless letters to the Church.
Please hear me: I don’t believe God causes pain and suffering. Rather, that He knows how to work all things for our good… so brilliantly that someday we may come to wonder whether He let the evil that befell us happen.
In fact, these places of pause and pain often carry a precious thing we needed, like rest. Green Street for me came in a wilderness season, when I was grieving a kind of grief you can’t publicly name.
I’ve spent a lot of time crying under my covers here, and yet healing has rushed in. How?
My body had space
I didn’t realize how much space my body had been craving until I moved into my three-tiered Harrisburg home. Though Green Street certainly bustles, at times, with foot traffic, I could not have moved to a quieter, more solitary space.
My roommates were in fact gone for the first week, and every morning I felt physically calmer: the kitchen remained empty and scented with Meyer’s lemon spray as I left it. The second floor stayed hushed as I brushed my teeth in the morning and strung my linen sheets into the washer. My domed clock ticked in solidarity on the third floor.
It felt like being alone on a freshly combed beach, when the tide recedes, and everything stretches wide and empty… except that feeling in my own home.
My mind had space
Even when my roommates returned, I discovered that they were the quiet, introverted type. Silence was preferred, coziness endorsed. Frequently, evenings looked like curling up in different nooks of the house, reading, journaling, crafting. Or sometimes just thinking.
It wasn’t that there was never talking, laughter, or company. Just that silence was cherished. My mind needed that, and even then, the chatter in my head still took time to settle. To this day, I feel anxious occasionally with the quiet. I have to remind myself that it is whole to sit in silence with others… it is whole to sit in silence with oneself.
My heart had space
When your mind and body are in a safe space, it’s amazing how fast your heart can breathe. It’s like a broken-winged bird brought into shelter, nourished, and given a ledge from which to fly again.
As my mind and body healed, my heart tiptoed out of the corner.
I painted a collage for my wall, created the themed bedroom I always wanted, and began learning how to cook: lentil soup, white chicken chili, and almond-flour banana bread. My heart expanded out the brick walls of the house, and I traversed the city streets. I took my roommate’s black poodle and discovered an antique but charming bookstore, coffee shops, a local sourdough store, and an Italian bakery. I found friends from church on my street and that the river never failed to deliver a mango-strawberry sunset, and I walked far enough—past our shaded, and sometimes cluttered blocks with houses perched atop each other—to find a neighborhood with sweeping grass lawns.
I began to write again. First the beginnings of a novel, then a spiritual blog I launched at my work, and as soon as my grad school semester ended, this—Ana of Green Street.
The world unfolded like origami.
What is a green street?
It’s an environment that makes dreaming possible. It’s the thing you need to restart your heart, to get it beating again. I had to move, but maybe you just need a new friend group, a new hobby, a good book, a place to serve in your community.
What do you need? This is the question I’ve been counseled to ask again and again.
What green street do you need, dear reader?
