The trailer was on the east side of Muncie. Small yard, one neighbor with a dog that barked at six and did not stop until eight, thin walls you could hear everything through. It was the first place Heather and I ever lived together.
She practiced piano in the living room. I could hear her from wherever I was in the house, which was not a large house, so that was everywhere. She would work a passage for an hour, stop, start again from the beginning. I would be reading or on the phone with someone from the church or doing nothing in particular, and the music would come through the wall. I don't know that I understood yet that this was extraordinary. When you are twenty-four and newly married and just arrived somewhere, you do not always recognize the thing you will remember for the rest of your life. You just live in it.
I had a job at First Baptist as worship arts director. I barely understood what that meant. I was preaching when Wade asked me to, leading music on Sundays, learning how a church actually works from the inside — which is different from how it looks from the outside in every way that matters. Wade Allen was my boss. Senior pastor, American Baptist, working on his DMin thesis, which was about John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus. I know this because he talked about it, and because some of the most important conversations I had in those years happened in his car on the way somewhere, and you learn what a person actually thinks when you spend enough time in a car together.
He did not make me feel like an idiot for not knowing things yet. That is a rare gift in a supervisor. I did not understand how rare until I had other supervisors.
We lived in the trailer for a while. Then our first house. A real house — walls that held heat, a bedroom door, a yard with some room in it.
We walked the neighborhood almost every night. This was before the kids, before the farm, before any of the decisions that would eventually bring us back south. We were just walking. Flat Indiana streets, the particular kind of flat you only get in the Midwest, where you can see a long way in every direction and there is nothing dramatic about any of it. Just the road ahead and whoever is walking next to you.
Some of the best conversations we have ever had happened on those sidewalks. The walk started in Muncie and it moved with us — to Weaver, to the county road in front of the parsonage, to wherever we are now. The location changes. The practice doesn't.
What I know is that we were figuring out how to be married in that flat Indiana landscape, before we had any idea what we were building. Sometimes we argued on the walk. We still took the walk. That is the whole thing, really. Not that we never fought. That we kept going anyway.
Early in our marriage we tried to model our life together on another couple. A senior pastor and his wife at the church — older than us, more settled, confident in ways we weren't yet. We watched how they moved through the church. How they handled conflict, or seemed to. How they showed up together in public and at dinners and at hard meetings. We were trying to build something and we were using someone else's blueprint to do it.
It took years to understand what was wrong with that. Not that they were bad models. They were good people. What was wrong was that we were not them, and the blueprint did not fit the building.
What you discover, eventually — and for us it happened slowly, not in one conversation — is that you have to find the ordinary shape of your own marriage. Not the vacation and the anniversary. The Tuesday. The Thursday. The walk around the block when things are still unsettled between you and you go anyway. We did not learn this from watching someone else do it. We learned it from doing it badly enough times that we finally started doing it as ourselves.
I worked with Youth for Christ that second or third year. Muncie High School director. Going into the schools, running a weekly club, showing up at events and practices and hallways. A stipend program paid something around twenty-five hundred a semester.
You did not do Youth for Christ for the money.
You did it because there were high school students in Muncie, Indiana who needed someone to show up, and nobody was going to do it if you didn't. What you learn from that kind of work — low-budget, low-profile, rooms where nobody is watching — is that you can do it. You learn that ministry does not require a building or a budget or a title. The work is the being there.
I was at Northern Seminary during those years, driving the Megabus to Chicago twice a week, learning the theology of faithful presence from Dave Fitch in a classroom in Lombard. The YFC work was where I found out that faithful presence was something you could actually do, not just argue about in a seminar. The high school students in Muncie did not care about my theology. They cared whether I showed up.
We drove to Rome, Georgia early in our marriage — down from Indiana, a long drive — to attend a marriage retreat at WinShape at Berry College. Not because things were bad. Because someone had told us this was worth doing before things got hard.
We sat in a room with other young couples and a teaching couple who ran the conference. They asked us to look at what we were carrying. Not what we wanted from the marriage. What we had already brought into it — the patterns we'd learned, the version of love we'd watched growing up and were now either repeating or reacting against.
The things you've been carrying for twenty years don't feel like weight anymore. They just feel like you.
Wade Allen read Yoder for his DMin thesis. He thought about what it means to lead a congregation that is not impressed by its own importance. He thought about power and who has it and what the church is supposed to do about that.
I was twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six. I was getting one education in a classroom twice a week and a different education on the I-69 south to Indianapolis on Mondays. Both mattered. The classroom gave me language. Wade gave me a model of what to do with it.
He asked questions instead of giving answers. Not always. But often enough that I learned to ask them too. When you are young and working in a church and trying to figure out who you are, what you mostly need is not more information. You need someone to take your questions seriously.
Wade took my questions seriously.
We came back to Alabama in 2014. Weaver First United Methodist Church. A county road instead of sidewalks. Woods behind the parsonage. The kids were small.
The walk moved with us. The practice stayed.
That is what Indiana gave me that I did not understand I was receiving while I was there. Five years of making a life in a place that was not mine — not the place I was from, not the place I'd end up — taught me that the practice is more durable than the place. The sidewalk in Muncie and the county road in Weaver are not the same walk. They are the same marriage.
You don't know what home is until you've lived somewhere long enough to miss it when you leave. I missed Muncie. I still do, sometimes, in the particular way you miss a version of yourself that you can't go back to. Young, newly married, figuring out what kind of life you were trying to build. That version of me existed on a flat Indiana street, in a trailer with thin walls, in a church where I didn't always know what I was doing.
What I was doing was becoming someone. Muncie gave me the room.
This is Part I of a two-part series. Part II: What Lombard Gave Me →
Matt Headley is a former pastor, former flower farmer, and the founder of Gather Studio in Anniston, Alabama. Southern Legends is his long-form project on the people and places of Northeast Alabama — including the ones who left and came back.
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