Homecoming

At homecoming events, people who once overlapped for a season of life come together to reminisce, laugh, and remember.

Yesterday was my homecoming at Eastern and I did all those things. I served this church for 8 years prior to moving to Illinois for graduate school. As I entered the council room in my robe, bulletin in hand, one of the elders looked at me and remarked, "It's as if no time has passed!" And that's how it felt: familiar, warm, homey.

During one of the opening songs I felt my eyes well up a bit, and determined not to look at a certain guitar player, lest he too start tearing up. But once the service was underway I was okay. The preaching went okay, I think. I'm not the best person to ask.

What was striking to me was how it felt both so normal and so far away all at the same time. My last four years have been full, and lots has changed inside me, and in some ways I'd be much more able to be a pastor now than I was then. I gazed out over the congregation I spied many people whom I wondered about: how is she doing? how is their marriage? what's the latest on his health? Beyond the superficial observations about weight lost or gained or hair going grey or cut in a new way there was this awakening of my pastoral heart, something that was dormant--let's say resting--during the last four years. I care about my students, of course, but I don't know most of them very well and I won't know most of them the way I knew my parishioners.

I'm asked at times about the differences between that job and the one I currently hold and here's a big one: I'm not a pastor anymore. I preach here and there, I have friends and students and others I care about, but I don't have a group of people that I am intentionally caring for, nurturing, encouraging, humoring, challenging. My heart has some vacancies now.

So, we'll see. It's simply too early to tell if this current job will capture my imagination and energy the way the previous one did. But I'm already doubting that it will capture my heart . . .