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!

There's Speaking English, and Then There's .....

Yesterday, I needed to make a reservation for a rental car. I decided to do it by phone. That wouldn't have been a bad idea, except that the customer service guy could barely speak comprehensible English, had a hard time understanding what I said, and could not answer my questions! He may have been Hispanic, or he may have been the result of out-sourcing to India. It's hard to say. One thing I can say is that it would be nice if companies would put people on their customer service jobs who can actually speak and understand the English language! This guy said that if we put the rental car on our debit card, there would be a "$300 hold." "What does that mean?" I asked. (Seemed like a logical question to me.) "It means," he bravely began, "that there will be a $300 hold." Thank you! I would have never guessed. I remember back in the mid-'90's, I called the toll-free number for buying tickets to a Colorado Rockies baseball game when Lydia and I were heading out to Denver for an EPC General Assembly. When I got home that afternoon and told Lydia that I had bought the tickets, she asked me if they were good seats. "I don't know," I told her. "I had so much trouble understanding the lady who was talking to me that I'm just glad I was able to buy tickets at all!" (Actually, they did turn out to be pretty good seats.) These conversations with people who are barely able to speak comprehensible English take place all the time--with tech support for computers, service requests for appliances, and any number of telephone dealings with large companies. Maybe they figure that most people are doing business on-line, anyway; so the telephone personnel are not chosen very carefully. And of course, the labor is much cheaper if you can channel calls to some guy living in a thatch--roofed hut in India or Pakistan! Still, it would be nice if American companies would give a thought now and again to genuine customer service by making sure that the customer service representatives really did provide some old-fashioned customer service--and do it in the language most of us in America actually understand--genuine, clear, properly enunciated, English! Is that asking too much? By the way, the $300 hold meant that if I put the cost of the rental car on my debit card, $300 of my bank account would be frozen for fourteen days after I turned in the car. I think we'll just go with the good old credit card instead!