Giving Thanks for the Blurry Lines – 11/25/2011
November 25th, 2011Thanksgiving has long been my favorite holiday. Food, football and family. It just doesn’t get much better than that. I love to cook and a day of puttering in my own kitchen with the television broadcasting two football games and and family checking in all day long is a “foretaste of the feast to come” for me. Heaven on earth. And then the day after you get to start playing Christmas music and put up some of your Christmas decorations! Pure bliss.
Thanksgiving also brings to mind “home” which has become a very confusing word for me. Where is home, really? Chalet 9 is where we live currently and is very much home, especially after living there for more than a year. We know the idiosyncrasies of the wood stove and how to get it running most efficiently. We have family photos and art on the walls and even a couple pieces of art magneted on the fridge. I have over the course of the past year and three months stocked the kitchen with my favorite gadgets from…home. That’s from the garage of the house in University Place that we own and are renting, where we have most of our “stuff” stored. It’s hard to call that place home since someone else is living there, but what else do I call it? When we leave Holden on an out we go…home…to my parents’ house in Gig Harbor. We have furniture there, a few clothes and most importantly family, so that’s home too, right? Then to really confuse me, when we’re out, we usually attend our…home… church where everyone says, “Welcome home!” It always feels a bit jarring when someone says that. It’s kind of like when some one says they’re leaving Holden and going out into the real world. Does that mean I live in an imaginary world? Sorry, tangent. I think one of the things that has happened for me here at Holden is that the lines are blurred for what is home.
I’ve fought against having multiple homes (hence the irritation when someone says welcome home at church). I suppose what I should do is embrace the confusion of what is home and rejoice in my wealth. I have four homes. I’m rich! Maybe I should come to terms with the blurred lines of home/not home.
Another place where lines have blurred for me is the concept of family, but that started long before I came to Holden. I grew up around aunts and uncles and cousins all of whom we made an effort to stay in contact with. We even made trips to Iowa and Ohio to visit the relatives “back east.” Family was a blood relative. After college, Chris and I move to southern California (his family was in northern California mostly and mine in the Pacific northwest mostly) We made friends there who became very much family. Our weekly bible study shared our struggles and joys and probably knew more about what was going on in our lives than most of our blood relative family.
That is happening again for us here at Holden. Chris and I joke that Tara is our daughter (she was born nearly 9 months to the day after we were married) and sometimes I think Corey’s parents are really the Carpenters – he spends more waking time in Chalet 6 than chalet 9. But it goes deeper than that. Anyone who comes to Holden village, be it for a day, or month, or a year, or more, is part of the Holden community…the Holden family. We eat together. We worship together. We work together. We play together. We share life together. We wave hello and goodbye and say welcome home! When someone is evacuated, we pack their bags. When a baby needs held, and sometimes even when he doesn’t need held, we line up. When someone is grieving, we grieve alongside and when they rejoice, we rejoice. We share stories and listen and laugh even when we’ve heard the story before. We loan each other our cars, and even though it’s a total pain to repair, we worry more about the person than the car when there’s an accident. We run two fire drills in one day to make certain we can keep everyone safe in an emergency. We volunteer for snack bar, wiping tables and an extra dish team to help out. We are family.
And that’s what I am most grateful for this Thanksgiving…the blurry lines of home and family. I am rich beyond measure. I have 4 homes and a family of thousands. Thanks be to God.
I’d like to close with a sort of modified scripture
I Thessalonians 1:1 – 4
Paul and Silvanus and Timothy and Cindy to the churches/communities of Thessalonia and Holden Village in God the Father and the Lord Jesus
Christ: Grace to you and peace. We give thanks to God always for all of you, making mention of you in our prayers, constantly bearing in mind your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ in the presence of our God and Father. Knowing brothers and sisters beloved by God, His choice of you.
I would add — His choice of you to be his child, part of God’s family.
Go in peace and embrace the blurry lines!
By Cindy Schultz
