Home

Home is where we live--or is it? I used to laugh at people who said that they were going "home" for the holidays, or "home" on vacation. I knew what they meant, of course. They meant that they were going back to where they had spent their childhood, back to where their parents lived. But how could that really be "home?" I wondered. After all, most of these people had families of their own now--spouses, children, jobs, pets. For most of the first part of my ministry, though, I guess I really thought of Nashville, Tennessee, as home. After all, my parents bought a house there in 1962. I had lived in that house all through high school, and considered it my official residence through college and seminary. My first pastorates had been relatively short, and I had not really established any other roots. Lydia and I didn't have children. We hadn't bought a home of our own. So Nashville, Tennessee, seemed about as good a place for me to call home as anywhere. Lydia's parents had lived in New Jersey when Lydia and I got married; but then, they moved to the Dallas area. Then in 1988, Lydia and I accepted a call to Northampton Presbyterian Church, in Hampton, Virginia. We rented a house. We were very compatible with the people. We liked the area. I remember coming back to Nashville in the summer of 1989, sitting out on my parents' front porch, and realizing, with a new sense of contentment, that I really finally had a new home. I knew I would always love Nashville, and would always enjoy coming back to that front porch; but I also knew that at last, Nashville was not home in any meaningful sense. My new home was in Hampton, Virginia. That was a liberating, joyous feeling. In 1994, Lydia and I bought our first house in Newport News. We had many happy years in Hampton. But it all ended in December, 2001. The church wanted to go in new directions. I just couldn't follow them. I knew I would always have a special feeling for those people and for that special period in my life; but I couldn't go along with their new course of worship and mission. Since then, we've been to Maine, to Jackson, Alabama, and now to somewhere else. I'm not sure where "home" is any more. I'm not sure I have one. My prayer is that this next ministry, wherever it is, will be our new home for many years to come--maybe for the rest of our lives. Everybody needs a real home--in that deep and abiding sense of the word. Of course, as Christians, we understand that ultimately our home is not in this world. We're heaven-bound. Yet, I long to have one more place here on earth that I can truly call home one more time--one more ministry, just one more!