Between Sundays
“Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.”
~ Psalm 90:1
I have been thinking about home this week.
That is a complicated word for a military brat. When you grow up moving, when your address changes before you have finished memorizing the last one, the question people ask so casually, where are you from, never quite has a simple answer. My mom is from Illinois. My dad is from Hampton, Virginia. I was born somewhere in between all of it, and raised, at least in part, in Germany, which is a wonderful place to be a child and an almost impossible thing to explain at a dinner party.
But here is what I have learned about home over the years. It is less about an address and more about a feeling. A place where something in you settles. Where your shoulders drop and your breathing slows and you remember, without quite knowing how, who you are.
This past week I was in Hampton, helping my parents pack up their home and make their final move to be closer to family. It was good and hard and holy work, the kind that comes with a lot of decisions about what to keep and what to let go, and a few too much tape and not quite enough boxes. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, early one morning, I found myself watching the sun come up over the water.
Buckroe has always been that for me. When we moved back and forth from Germany to the States, Hampton was the constant. Buckroe was where the world made sense again. Sitting there this week, watching that sunrise paint everything gold and rose and impossible, I felt it again, that deep settling, that quiet sense of being held by a place that has known you a long time.
I have a few places like that. Buckroe Beach. Manidokan, our Methodist retreat center where I have taken hundreds of students over the years and watched God show up in the silence and the woods and the late night conversations around a fire. Appalachia, really anywhere you can sit among the mountains and find an Ale-8-One in the cooler at the local grocery store, which if you know, you know. These are a few of my home places. The ones that have shaped me and steadied me and given me back to myself when I needed it most.
I wonder if you have them too?
The Psalmist understood something about this. Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Not a building. Not an address. A presence. The God who was home to our grandparents and their grandparents before them, who travels with us through every move and every season and every moment of letting go, is the same God who meets us in the places that feel most like ourselves. The beach at sunrise. The mountain trail. The church pew worn smooth by decades of faithful people. The kitchen table where someone who loves you is already putting on the coffee.
Home is where God finds us. And the beautiful, sustaining truth is that God is always finding us, in the familiar places and the unfamiliar ones, in the seasons of settling and the seasons of packing up and moving on.
I am carrying this week with me as I come back to you, a little tender, a little grateful, a little more aware than usual of how much the people and places that have held us over the years are worth pausing to honor. My parents are brave and they are loved. And I am grateful for every place that has ever felt like home, including this one.
See you Sunday, Calvary.
Until Sunday, and all the days between,
Dr. Hutton