Crossroads
God dropped the best people of my life in a corner of Germany and called it coincidence.
There are seasons of your life you don’t fully appreciate until you’re standing twenty years on the other side of them, squinting back through the distance trying to understand how something that good was even real.
I have to remind myself sometimes that Germany actually happened to me.
I know because I still feel it when I close my eyes. The cold that bit your face the second you stepped outside the gate. The smell of wood smoke and pine and something baked with butter that had no business smelling that good at seven in the morning. The quality of European Christmas light that makes everything look like it was painted by someone who believed in God and meant it.
I was nineteen years old and I had survived January 2003 by the skin of my teeth and the grace of a chaplain with a plane ticket. I had survived the wisdom teeth and the Percocet haze and Dorian Hex showing up at my door like a bad omen in work boots. I had survived the phone call about my brother and the hallway and the grief that didn’t have a shape yet.
And then, somewhere in the exhale after all of that, Crossroads found me.
Or I found it. I’m still not entirely sure which direction that went.
Crossroads was a nondenominational fellowship that met on base. Military kids and civilians and believers from every branch who had somehow all ended up in the same corner of Germany at the same time and decided that was probably not an accident. Someone who was there — a man who commented on a reunion photo twenty years later like no time had passed at all — said it best: “Crossroads was what heaven is going to be like.”
He wasn’t wrong.
It was loud and messy and full of people carrying things they hadn’t told anyone about yet. It was Rafi Vega who would become my brother in Christ forever, and Jamie Briggs the reformed bad boy who found Jesus and somehow ended up almost talking me into Bible college, and the three Johns. Little John and Medium John and Big John, the Army sweetheart, with the heart of gold. Because of course there were three Johns. There are always three Johns. God has a sense of humor and apparently a fondness for the name John.
And then there were Brynn and Cade Stone.
They were both officers. They were married. Watching them together was the first time I understood, not intellectually but in my actual bones, what it looked like when two people chose each other on purpose every single day. They made you feel like a little sister just by being near them. I decided I wanted that. I didn’t know yet that I’d carry that image all the way to Arkansas, or that it would still be the measuring stick I used decades later when I finally found my own version of it.
It was Jinx Prime. It was Wren. It was Arielle. It was Felicity. It was Marissa. It was the three Johns. It was Rafi. It was Jamie. It was the P31 girls.
It was my guild.
If you’ve never seen Fairy Tail, and you should, but that’s a separate conversation, the story starts with a girl named Lucy who is desperately lonely and searching for somewhere she belongs. Then she stumbles into this ridiculous chaotic family of misfits who would burn the world down for each other and she thinks: oh. This is it. This is the thing I’ve been looking for.
That’s Crossroads. That’s exactly what Crossroads was.
Abigail was the one who gave me a table to sit at before I knew I needed one. Proverbs 31 women’s group met on Thursday nights and ate things and talked about God and life and men and faith and the exhaustion of trying to be a good woman in a world that wasn’t always sure what that meant. Abigail led it with the quiet authority of someone who had been through enough to know that showing up was the whole practice. She didn’t make a fuss about it. She just kept the door open.
I walked through it. I kept walking through it. It saved me in ways I’m still counting.
Stevie Rowe was the one I’d call a decade later on my fortieth birthday to charter a women’s veterans cruise, because that’s what you do with the people who knew you before you knew yourself. She was fighting her own legal battle for things that had been done to her, carrying her own childhood weight, loving Joseph from a careful distance while I quietly stepped aside because I could see what she couldn’t say out loud. We never talked about that. We didn’t have to. That’s the thing about guild members. Some things just get understood.
Wren Hadley had strawberry blonde hair, glasses, and the sweet silly energy of someone who loved Jesus and had strong opinions about military rank. She had recently made SSgt and she wanted everyone to know that rank was not just a stripe. It was the moment people finally stopped treating you like furniture. “You become SSgt,” she said once with complete sincerity, “and suddenly everyone acts like you’re a person.”
She also had a cat named Lucy.
Lucy shed with the dedication and volume of an animal who understood she was the real authority in that household. Lucy’s fur was everywhere. On the couch, on the curtains, in your coffee if you weren’t vigilant, coating every surface with a fine layer of what Wren had officially christened the Lucifer of the apartment.
The best Christmas I had in Germany happened in that apartment.
All the girls. Blankets and bad movies and the kind of laughter that goes on too long and becomes its own thing. The guys showed up later, they always showed up later, as guys do, and somehow a random Tuesday night in December in a German apartment covered in cat fur became Christmas dinner and it was perfect. It was the kind of perfect that doesn’t announce itself. You only recognize it later, standing twenty years away, squinting back through the distance.
The other Christmas — and I’m still not sure if it was the same year or the next, time moves strangely when you’re young and alive and somewhere beautiful — we drove to Rothenburg ob der Tauber.
Bavaria. December. Night.
If you have never stood in a medieval German village at Christmas after dark, I cannot fully explain what it does to a person. The whole town glows. Not the aggressive LED glow of an American strip mall in December. Something older than that, something that knows what it’s doing. Lanterns and candles and wooden stalls selling things that smell like cinnamon and smoke. Nativity scenes carved from wood tucked into every alcove. Your breath a small cloud in front of your face. The cobblestones wet and gleaming.
A handful of us Crossroads girls walked through it without saying much. Sometimes beauty asks for quiet and you know enough to give it.
I was twenty years old and I had survived things I was still carrying and I was standing in the most beautiful place I had ever been in my life surrounded by women who would still be my people two decades later.
I didn’t know yet what was coming. Arkansas, the separation, the men who would find the wound and the ones who would make it worse. I didn’t know yet about the drinking or the psych ward or the long slow crawl back to myself.
I just knew it was cold and it was beautiful and I was not alone.
For a girl who had spent most of her life learning to need less, that was everything.
Crossroads ended the way good things in the military always end. By PCS orders, one person at a time, until the table is empty and the door is still open but nobody’s walking through it anymore.
We scattered. Germany to Arkansas to stateside bases to civilian lives to marriages and divorces and children and battles we fought without each other. The guild disbanded the way guilds do. Not with drama, just with distance and time and the slow arithmetic of separate lives.
But here’s what I know about guilds.
You carry them with you. Every single one. The table Abigail kept open lives in me somewhere and I set it for other people now without always knowing why. The Lucy-Lucifer fur is probably still on a jacket somewhere in a closet in Florida. Stevie Rowe is still in my phone contacts and my fortieth birthday memory and a dozen Tuesday nights I’ll never get back and don’t want to.
Crossroads was what heaven is going to be like.
I believe that. I was there.