Home Again

A partial family reunion on the Kentucky River with my dad, my brother Dave and his wife Shannon, their two boys Nathan and Noah, and our kids, Mark and Becca. My dad is literally surrounded and supported by his family. August 12, 2014
Since this picture was taken, we have flown to Eastern Europe and have begun our first event.

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Lisa and I enjoy precision with words, and wrangling over the proper use of words. When we were in Kentucky, I would occasionally talk about "going home" which sloppily meant, for me, going back to the hotel we were staying at in Lexington while visiting my father and seeing some of my siblings and nephews. Lisa would correct me: the hotel is not home. And, in fact, we weren't going "home" if home meant, as it usually does, the place one lives, since we had, the previous week, moved out of our home in San Gabriel. No, we wouldn't be going home for a long time.

When we arrived here in our current (undisclosed) location, Lisa announced that she would forgo this usual bit of verbal skirmish: from now on, our "home" is wherever our luggage currently resides. So we can talk about going on a walk and then, at some point, turning back for "home," to our room at the conference facility. Our blog, after all, is called "One Hundred Homes" because we have decided to make our home wherever we are and with whomever we are with at the time. We expect that we will enjoy dozens of homes before our trip concludes in a year's time. So far, we are on number 8 (counting the seven different places we stayed in Russia and Central Asia during July).

So we are home again, in a new city and country for us, among people we have just met but are already starting very much to enjoy and have affection for. The conference teaching starts in a couple hours, and will involve eleven sessions between us over the three days. As we gather with people in Jesus' name, gathered around his Word to pursue his purposes in all of our lives, we find we are, truly, at home.