Home
26/07/16 05:05
A quick trip for family business has me back in Montana for a day. Although I’ll be returning home today, I did have a little time yesterday to visit some of my old haunts. The river is running low - just right for the kind of playing and floating that we did as children. I confess that I haven’t taken time to play in this particular river for years. It seems that my adult visits to the home place are focused on business to be accomplished, and tasks that need to be done. This trip is no different. It is about 400 miles one way and I’m here for a couple of one-hour meetings and then I’ll rush back home. Of course I refer to the place where I grew up as “home” and I refer to the house where I’ve lived for the past 21 years as “home” as well, so it can be confusing to talk to me when I’m going back and forth between these particular places.
It is less true these days than was the case a generation ago, but the response to the call to be a minister has always involved a sense of going where one is called as opposed to choosing where one wants to live. In the journals of some of our forebears are the stories of the families of Methodist ministers serving on the frontier of Montana packing up all of their belongings each June and heading of to the annual conference not knowing where they would be going next. The bishop and the conference would make the appointments for the year and the minister and family would go forth, often to a new place. Being ready and able to move frequently was accepted as a normal part of the life of a clergy family.
Our life has been a bet less mobile. In our first call, we served for seven years, making our pastorate the second-longest in the 75+ year history of those churches. We stayed ten years in our second call, which was a record for that church at the time, but our successor stayed even longer. At 21 years in this call, we’ve surpassed all of our predecessors in this congregation’s 137-year history. It is likely that our time of service will extend to at least double that of the longest previous pastorate. These longer pastorates are the product of exceptional matches between congregation and pastor, but they are also reflections of the times in which we live. Ministers are less likely to have to move as frequently as was the case in previous generations.
Still, there is something about one’s home town and home place. Unlike many of my peers, my family still has an actual piece of property that belonged to our parents and was the location of our growing up and the adventures of our early lives. Like the rest of the world, things have changed. I don’t know the names that go with the faces on main street. There are new owners for the businesses and many of those businesses have changed dramatically from their function when we were going up. Our father’s John Deere dealership is now a pet grooming and boarding place. It has been a thrift store, and a variety of other businesses over the years. There is a lawyer’s office on main street in a building that used to be a bar and there is an art gallery on main street - not a feature of the rough and tumble western town of which we were proud as children.
And yet the place has a feel to it that is familiar to me. The feed store is still a feed store. T/he hardware store is in the same location it has occupied for a very long time. And the river still carries fresh snowmelt from the mountains down to the Yellowstone, which flows into the Missouri, then the Mississippi and then on to the Gulf of Mexico. That means that no matter how hot it gets in the midst of the summer, there is a ready source of cool water flowing right by our old home place. Although in the days of our childhood it was safe to drink the water straight out of the river - you’d want to use a filtration system these days before drinking - the river is still fairly clean and definitely refreshing.
I didn’t have time to play in the water yesterday, but I did take a walk along the shore. The river bed is all well-rounded rocks, which makes travel slow. There is a bit of technique to walking on the rocks, but such a stroll was so much a part of my growing up years that it just takes me a minute to remember how to keep my balance as I walk from the top of one rock to the next, looking down to make sure that my feet fall in the right places.
Although this is the place of my childhood and growing up, I now have lived in South Dakota longer than I lived in Montana. The Black Hills are as much my home as is this place. And when I am at our home in South Dakota I feel a familiarity and centeredness in our house that is no longer a part of visiting this place. Here I am not surrounded by my belongings. And as I write this morning, I am eager to return to the hills and my work as soon as I have finished today’s business.
Jesus once commented to his disciples, “foxes have dens, and birds have nests. But the Son of Man doesn’t have a place to call his own.” The sentiment is reported in both Matthew and Luke. There can be a sense of rootlessness that comes from a life that is dedicated to responding to the call of service no matter where it takes one. But that very process grants freedom from becoming overly attached to a single place in a world where our lives pass quickly and things are constantly changing. There is another verse of scripture that reminds me of where my home truly is. It is the opening of Psalm 90: “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.”
No matter how much I travel, I’m never far from home.