Welcome Home
The time I spent in Peru as the son of missionaries has definitely had an impact on my concept of home. During the ten years I spent there, our family moved eight times. One of those times we moved from a beautiful four bedroom home to a one-bedroom apartment where we lived for ten months. My bed was located under the breakfast table.
Despite all the moves, I always felt like we were home because we were together as family.
It was right around the time our family finally found a permanent home that it was my turn to graduate from school and move back to the U.S. for college. Figures. I remember standing in the Jorge Chavez International Airport saying my goodbyes, and moments before I boarded the plane my dad gave me $120 and told me that was all he had to give me. He told me I’d have to trust God, because that was the truest inheritance he had given me - a faith in a good God. I had no real concept of “American money” back then and figured $120 could last me several months up here.
When I moved back to the U.S. in 1996, I had a similar nomadic experience where home was concerned. I moved seven times in the first three years of my return, yet this time I felt alone through the process. It wasn’t until I got married in 1999 that I finally felt home again, and it wasn’t because we had a place of our own, but because I was with my best friend and love of my life, Stephanie. Because my concept of home has less to do with location or infrastructure and more to do with who I am with and those who surround me.
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I wonder if all of these life experiences were a purposed conditioning of sorts. Because the past year of church planting has brought many of these times back to mind. In the past seven months our team has visited ten churches and gathered for worship ten times hopping between three different locations. And my office has been the breakfast table.
In the process of planting a church together as a team I have watched this highly unlikely group of people go from being friends to being church family.
Last Sunday we had our last preview service. In the car on the return home my wife looked at me and said, “I finally felt like I was home.”
She was right. It felt like we had come home. It felt like all the travels and moves had come to a end and all the journeying had been worth it. It gave us stories, relational history, and memories together. The people, now friends and church family, those who surrounded us that morning had made the moment home.
On September 13 we open our home for others to come. And I can’t wait!
[Our church, Bloom, opens to the public on Sunday September 13 at Central High School in St Paul, MN. We gather at 10:30am as an unlikely group of friends who now has become family.]
