The "Our" Part of Lincoln Park

The more time Neal and I spend making Chicago our home, the more places evolve as "our" places, the places that tell stories about a certain month, a certain season, or a much more lengthy span of time in our lives here in Chicago.

The northern part of Lincoln Park is a place that sets the stage of much of our summer and early fall 2010 story. It will tell stories about Vespa rides up to the garden whose blooms didn't come into their full glory until late summer and early fall. We would know, because we were there often enough to watch the changes.

Lincoln Park would tell you that we didn't really meet this part of the park until this summer, because it had always been just a bit too far to walk. Until the Vespa.

It would talk of times, both brief and longer, that he and she settled onto one of the benches to catch up after a long day, take a break from the busyness or pass the time of a free afternoon, to try to make sense of their lives, to dream of what they did know, to take the time to observe all that is happening in the present. To ask questions. To drink coffee. Only to strap on helmets and glasses and hop on the Vespa to head back home. Until the next time.

Taking the Vespa up to this Lincoln Park garden, on the lawn of the conservatory, has become as natural to us in this season as suburb people settling on their back patios, and country people on their porches. It's been the place at which we end up, without even asking the question, "Where should we go?"

If you would want to know what is going on in our lives lately, you could just go the park and ask.

It would say things like doctor appointments, ministry perspectives, student care issues, my unknown future and plans, personal growing edges, travel dreams, calendar commitments, friends we love, and random stories.

But more than what it would say, would be the sights it would stream into your senses.










There it is. The "our" part of Lincoln Park.