The hills of home

The hills of home

Tammi and I like to travel. Since early June, we’ve been in 12 states, other than Texas. We drove and got a good look at the South as well as peek into the Midwest. Driving across Madison County, Arkansas (between Wesley and Tuttle if that helps) I was struck by how my home region looked and felt to me. It’s not a preference I’ve been encouraged to embrace.

As a family, we’ve traveled light for most of our 30 years. We didn’t even buy a house until about five years ago. I think it made us available, maybe too available, for new ministry opportunities.

I also take seriously Peter’s comment about being aliens and strangers on the earth. We are strangers here and embracing a place too tightly seems contrary to that idea. But the Ozarks region just seems special to me. Maybe that’s OK?this might be a godly instinct after all.

Most people treasure the place where they grew up. There are some good reasons for that. First, it’s comforting to go someplace where things are familiar. We’re not startled to find that the barbecue sauce is mostly vinegar or the meat is pork. We know five or six ways to get from one end of town to another. We know where our ancestors used to live. We can unclench a bit when the sights, smells, and memories seem right.

Secondly, we all value a place where we are known and loved. I can plop down in my folks house on the 40 year-old bench Dad made for the breakfast bar and pick up the same conversations we had when they were new. No one there needs me to earn my spurs every week or year. I belong. It’s comforting.

We also love a place that seems perfect. Don’t we idealize places and people no longer part of our “present tense?” It’s harder to remember the dull summer days and wondering how to fill the hours without helping with the yard work. Now I remember only the simplicity and peace of those days. The cranky aunt who baby-sat us is long forgiven and a nice part of the home county now. Yes, it is obviously not perfect but home seems more perfect than anyplace we can go, for now.

Even though part of the ongoing conversation back home has to do with how things are changing, home also seems relatively stable. Familiarity extends to the point that we can get far enough away from new development to find those places that are still the same. Last trip, I found out that I can still find Great Grandma’s house and that it still stands. So does the old barn. At home we can find places that affirm our desire for something unchanging.

Here’s why I’ve decided that this is all OK. These characteristics are true of our heavenly home and give us an analog for what’s still to come. It’s the same way that our earthly fathers should, and mostly do, prepare us to understand our relationship with our heavenly father. The image is not perfect but it whets our appetite for what is to come. That has value. All places should not be the same to us because of the meaning we attach to them?particularly the relationships they represent.

Most places I go, even in our current home town, there is a strangeness to the place in my eyes. Sometimes there is even risk or threat in the strangeness. The thought that this will give way to something more familiar, and I know it because my earthly home town is a snapshot of it, is part of the hope we get from our relationship with God through Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit. We know a little of what our perfect home will feel like because we’ve experienced the second-best thing.

On the other hand, the center of God’s will is your sweet spot for now. The fact that another place on earth is special to you should not justify resentment of that different place you currently serve. We should go easy on the “boy, is this place backward” or “boy, is this place crowded” stuff. Remember that you are talking about someone else’s favorite place on the planet. They might miss the good things you say in the midst of the self-indulgent nonsense.

It is a great benefit to our ministries when we explore and value the unique charms of everyplace God plants us. Learning the peculiar history, dialect, and customs of our present tense location is part of submission to God’s will in putting us there. Maybe you’ll be an outsider to some for the next thirty years, but the effort will be winsome to most. It will change your heart as well as your accent.

Northwest Arkansas becomes a little less like home as things change and as people pass on. In a couple of years we’ll have children in three places where Tammi and I don’t live. This will change what I value “back home.” George Carlin used to say that home is where