serviceable detours

Two years ago, I preached an absolute banger of a sermon with the congregation that raised me. First Church voted that day to move forward with selling the building they’d inhabited for more than 75 years, and soon after that they decided to dissolve their congregational status entirely. Those folks are still navigating that change, but they’re doing it with their signature good humor and grace.

The sermon I preached that day was about the massive bridge replacement that’s been happening here on my block for the last two years, about how infrastructure is essential but not eternal. It was a sermon about change, and how we live our way through it.

Two years ago, demolition on the 85 year old bridge that connected my neighborhood with Downtown Roanoke had just begun. The bridge spanned the Roanoke River AND the Norfolk Southern train tracks, which meant that taking it down required particular care and engineering. It took a long time.

But I did not realize that the demolition process for the old bridge would be happening simultaneously with the construction of the new one: one end of the bridge was dismantled long before the other side was, so at one point the disjointed structure was half old and half new. Chaotic, really, and sort of jarring to look at. Change, it turns out, is not as clean or linear as we might expect.

We’re getting close to the projected bridge completion date - I’ve heard suggestions of both August and October in the last couple of weeks. This week, we hit a major milestone for those of us who live here in the bridge’s shadow. The greenway that had been detoured for the last two years through the neighborhood in order to avoid passing under the demolished bridge finally got re-routed. It’s not back to its permanent path just yet, but we get to cut out the extra two blocks of walking and pass directly beneath the new bridge! Instead of meandering my way up alleys and down side streets, I can walk in a straight line again, following the path of the river from my building all the way to the pedestrian bridge that crosses the river a half-mile upstream.

On Monday, the dog and I turned a corner and discovered the orange cones and safety fencing had disappeared, replaced by scruffy pavement, green arrows and an OPEN PATHWAY directly underneath the brand new bridge. We walked around a kid on his bike who had stopped to take a picture of the new route and stepped through the magical portal. I grinned the whole time, and when we emerged on the other side, I shouted at the construction guys who were standing there chatting: “WE’VE BEEN WAITING SUCH A LONG TIME TO GET TO DO THAT!!!!”

I don’t think the construction guys heard my excitement as the compliment it was meant to be, but I was ecstatic. I’ve been waiting so long for something to open up, for a way to be made visible, for the long, frustrating, exhausting detour to be made unnecessary. I’d gotten so used to those extra blocks in our daily walk, so accustomed to avoiding the direct artery, so conditioned to taking the long way that I had almost forgotten how easy it used to be to walk straight through, following the path of the river.

Finally: a little less disruption and a little more ease. After so many months of demolition and disturbance, a solid glimpse of the new reality to come.

The bridge isn’t finished. The greenway isn’t back in its permanent path - even this route under the bridge that I walked this week is temporary. But things are shifting. The old bridge is definitely gone, and I can begin to see - and experience - what the new one is going to be. A little light, a little openness, a little peek into what we could only barely begin to imagine two years ago when things started getting torn down.

That’s how things work, I suppose. We get thrown into the chaotic construction sites of change, trying our best to survive while everything gets torn down and built up simultaneously. We figure out serviceable detours around old certainties, bushwhacking new routes into our routines and our hearts that can carry us where we need to go. And sometimes, just when we start to think that the detours will last forever, that we’ll have to bushwhack our way to the end, a new road appears. Sometimes, a way opens and we find our feet set back down on the very trail we’d been trying to find all along.

Can you believe our luck?