Home, sweet home

No, I'm not one of those people who owns multiple houses and calls them "homes." I only live one place at a time, and a single house is about all I can handle.

But I'm fortunate to call several places "home." 

The poet Robert Frost wrote, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." That's a beautiful, lyrical expression, but I don't fully agree. For me, home is the place where, when you get to go there, they want to take you in.

Mostly, I'm at home in favorite spaces—towns and communities made special by events that took place there, campuses where I learned important lessons, churches that embodied Christ to me, houses of family and friends where I always feel welcome, special places in nature where I feel gladness amidst God's beauty, and even booths in restaurants with people dear to me.

Ironically, "home" does not include houses where I formerly lived. Even though our family enjoyed special, happy times in them, they now belong to someone else now. I would be a stranger within their walls, and they hold no significan meaning apart from sacred memory.

Well, I journeyed to one of my favorite homes this past weekend. Richard Laverty, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Perryton, located far, far north in the Texas  Panhandle, invited me to preach in his absence. What a treat.

First Baptist Church of Perryton has been a missions-minded congregation for generations. In 1963, they felt God leading them to start a new church on the north side of town, and sometime around Thanksgiving, they voted to call my father as the first pastor of their mission, Key Heights Baptist Church. 

I was in the first grade when we moved to Perryton, and we stayed there almost exactly 10 years. It was a wonderful, formative, invigorating, lovely decade. First Baptist "loaned" some of its members to Key Heights and got the young congregation off to a strong, healthy start. Members of both those churches loved and mentored me. Teachers and administrators in the local schools likewise poured themselves into the lives of my classmates and me, and we all had an opportunity to receive a remarkable education. Parents of friends, coaches and kind folks in the community sacrificed to make our town a fine place to raise a family.

Besides the knowledge I learned in the span between my seventh and 17th birthdays, I benefited enormously from the folks who called that positive, affirming, hard-working, proud-in-the-best-sense-of-the-word town their home, too. 

An old African proverb says, "It takes a village to raise a child." While Perryton is half a world away from Africa  (but, ironically, the same evening I arrived, a  team from First Baptist returned home from a mission trip to Lesotho in southern Africa), that proverb was and is true.

Of course, Perryton wasn't and isn't perfect. But Perryton blessed my life, and I'll be grateful forever.

During the weekend, I looked upon faces, filtered through 37 years of absence, and saw smiles and eyes and heard voices that belong to people whose debt I never can repay. But I thank God—and them—for loving a little preacher's kid and his family, and making all our lives far, far better.