Dan's Thoughts

Vision #23 - September 18, 2006

A few days ago in Quito, I visited the house where I lived as a teenager. My mom and dad, my sisters, brother and I all stood outside, taking pictures of the place we called home over thirty years ago. The present owner saw us and came out to find out what we were up to. When we told him we had lived here, he invited us in. Soon, his wife arrived. As it turned out, she remembered my parents. As a matter of fact, her sister, who is a lawyer, processed my brother’s adoption papers.

Thirty six years ago, we were immigrants to Ecuador. Like most immigrants, we were sometimes afraid and confused. However, the kind people of Ecuador accepted us and Quito became our second home. In time, my parents even adopted a Quechua Indian boy who had been abandoned on the steps of The Church of San Francisco in downtown Quito.

My sisters married there. That’s why their children are half Ecuadorian. It’s also how most of my family is brown and bilingual.

As families they change location, nationality and language, they evolve in unforeseen ways. In fact, the only predictable thing about a family as it moves from generation to generation is that it changes.

A few days ago, some gracious people invited us into our old house. It is not ours anymore. The same thing is true of our little church that we started in Quito. It is now a congregation of many thousands. Naturally, we are proud of it. But we don’t lead it anymore. The present pastor invited us to speak last Sunday because he is a gracious man. He wanted to honor us and we appreciate it. However, he was under no obligation to receive us because it is not our church anymore. In one way of speaking, everything has changed.

Our old house was small, by the way; it was not nearly as large as I remember. This tells me that even my memories evolve. It makes me wonder: as the years pass, what possibly survives of our identity as individuals and as groups? What remains constant enough to allow some sense of “family” to survive the ravages of time?

For a believer, there is only one answer. Our sense of family remains constant only if we work to make our family a part of the family of God. We must become children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Only in this way do our families transcend time and culture. We must root our children and grandchildren more to faith than to a place. Like our elder brothers, the Jews, we must realize that “here we have no certain dwelling place but we look for one to come.”

West Virginia is my home. Ecuador is my home. Tennessee is my home. My family is American and Ecuadorian. It is White and Brown. We speak English. We speak Spanish. As it turns out, these are really superficial differences. They do not divide us because we have been working to base our unity upon something far deeper than mere human culture. We are the people of God, wherever we live and whatever we own.

Twenty five thousand people in Ecuador know my family name. We are welcome in any one of their homes. Any of these people will gladly feed us or serve us in any way that they can. What is that if not family?

Very little seems stable in this age of globalization. Our borders seem incapable of maintaining our national identity. Many people are naturally angry and frustrated by a sense of ceaseless change. Most of us long for a secure identity for ourselves, for our families and for our nation that time and circumstance will not erode.

We must learn somehow though that we cannot really root our identities in a place, a time, a language, or a nationality. We only discover real stability in the One who is the same, “yesterday, today and forever.” Only in Him and in His work do we find a secure home in a “city not made with hands, whose builder and maker is God.”

The wonderful thing is, when we locate our deepest identity in the Kingdom of God, we cease being strangers anywhere on earth. Time loses its power to dissolve our sense of self. Instead of slowly disintegrating, our sense of family expands. We gain family instead of lose family.

As we learn to release our control over people, time and circumstance, we gain permanence and a connection to all that has been and to all that will come. We become eternal. And we never leave home again.

Dan