Labor Day is Red... and Blue and White!

p.s. Happy Labor Day!!


Okay. I'll go ahead and post the piece about home. Unedited. Let me know what you catch.

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On finding home - - 8-29-08

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have always struggled with the idea of home. Is it a place? A house that turns into a home in time? Perhaps it is meant to be some place that you are supposed to carry inside of you? Or perhaps it is another name for that mystical place above the clouds we think we go to when we die?

Though, to me, it seems cruel that we find home at some points in our lives and then not in others. More recently, I have begun to realize that home is entirely other and indescribable. In one of my favorite movies, Garden State, they are discussing the idea of home. Largeman says, “You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone. You'll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know... I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.” I can sympathize so much with that; home is an imaginary place.

Who hasn't been back to a house they once called home and found it void of that sentiment? The trees are different. The front door is a different color. But more than that. Different people live there. That's not your mother, father, sister, brother, or dog running around. That's not your home.

And for everyone at LSTC, we have not always considered this place our home. We have not always considered Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, or the United States our home. But here we are.

As my best friend phrased it best when he wrote in his goodbye note to me, “Go make a home of all the hearts waiting for you in Chicago.” This is because we realized that home is not a building or a house or any real location you can put a push pin in on a big map. Home is the people around you.

That childhood house was home because you found family there. You played with your friends there. Your aunts and uncles came to visit you there. It was home because of the people in the house.

So in the past year, my best friend and I decided to make people our home. Not just anyone, of course. But people that get you. People that understand some small part of who you are as a human being. People that surround you and support you and celebrate you for all that you are and hope to be. People that notice the small changes in you whether you did or not. People that share their story with you and let you invest in who they are. People we find peace in.

So I guess all I have to really say is, I hope you find home here. I hope you find home in your community. I hope you find home when you go off into the world to start your ministry. And to steal the words of my best friend once again, “I hope you find home in all the hearts waiting for you.”