Your Adventure Awaits…Maybe Right at Home
One of my all-time favorite classic movies is Frank Capra’s 1947 It’s a Wonderful Life starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. Although this film is almost exclusively and religiously watched at Christmas time, apart from the tear-jerking Christmas Eve scene at the end, It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t primarily about Christmas. The film is really about the strength of family, the importance of community, and the blessing of blooming right where you’re planted. I’ve always identified closely with Jimmy Stewart’s character, George Bailey, as a young man from a small town with big transcontinental dreams.
George Bailey spends most of his life feeling utterly trapped in his home town. His little brother becomes a WWII hero, goes off to college, and then lands a job upstate with a lot of upward mobility. His best friend makes his millions in “plastics.” All the while George accelerates towards his 40’s (complete with fedora and pipe) just eking out a living, driving a broken-down car, living in a “drafty old house,” and holding down the fort at his late father’s “nickel and dime” Bedford Falls Building and Loan.
Because of his growing resentment for being stuck in Bedford Falls, George becomes blind to the great blessings he has in his beautiful loving wife, his precious four children, and all the dedicated friends he has impacted in the community over the years due to his benevolent heart. George Bailey, though he can’t see it until it is all mysteriously and momentarily taken away, is a truly blessed man who himself has been a tremendous blessing to his family, friends, and community.
I have reasoned like the younger George Bailey for the better part of my life. Just three months after the Beatles broke up, I was born at the same hospital where my mother was born. I grew up only nine blocks from my mom’s childhood home. I had a great childhood there. Whether playing baseball in the park or swimming all day at the public pools, I have fond memories of growing up in Dearborn, MI in the 1970’s and 80’s.
I attended all the same schools my mom did. I even grew up in the same church both my mother and grandmother had grown up in. Life was good. But as I entered my later teen years, I began to fear that I’d suffocate if I didn’t get out of my home town. Dearborn became my Bedford Falls. I wanted out. I wanted to see the world. I wanted George Bailey’s trunk with all the stickers from countries all around the world in foreign languages. I wanted to be esteemed by my peers for being a world traveler.
Unlike George Bailey, however, I did get my chance to move out and see the world. My travels began with going away to university where I met my wife, Christie. During those years our pastor confirmed something I had sensed God telling me since I was 17 years old: I was called to serve God and his church in full time ministry.
“God was calling me to align my heart to his plan, not only his plan for my life, but his plan for my life as it is a part of his plan for the world.”
Back in my junior year of high school, I was given the opportunity to be a part of a youth leadership training camp. The camp met for four weekends throughout the school year. There I (along with 20 other teenagers from churches around Michigan) was challenged to read the whole New Testament, prepare Bible studies, and learn what it meant to be a leader in God’s church. The Word of God was having a profound impact on my heart. I was beginning to see God’s heart in God’s word. I began to have a deep conviction that whatever God had revealed in his word was for me. It was for my good. It was for his purpose in the world. If I aligned my heart to the heart of God he would lead me along the path of following him wherever he wanted me to go. God was calling me to align my heart to his plan, not only his plan for my life, but his plan for my life as it is a part (albeit, a very very small part!) of his plan for the world.
All of this was affirmed later through the college ministry where Christie and I met. So, as we planned for our wedding after graduation from Michigan State University, we also researched places to prepare for a life-time of ministry. Eight months after we were married we moved to New England where we attended seminary known at the time to have a very high view of God’s word.
It was not long before it was clear that God was continuing to call us to keep aligning our hearts to his plan according to his word. It was during a required course in world missions. The professor, Dr. J. Christy Wilson, who had grown up in Pakistan and served with his wife in Afghanistan in the 1960’s, was passionate for opening the eyes of young adults to the mission heart of God.
“We were serving God in an international context right in my home town! God used us right where we had originally been planted.”
This got us thinking of our home town, Dearborn, home to one of the most dense populations of peoples from the Middle East. How might God use us there? After four years at seminary and the birth of our first son, we spent a year in Jordan studying Arabic. Then we headed back to my home town to serve the community with my home church. We were serving God in an international context right in my home town! God used us right where we had originally been planted.
But after five years and four more children, we were off again. There was a deep burden in our hearts that I should pastor a local church. Searching from coast to coast we were eventually called to pastor a church in Tacoma, WA. We spent two wonderful years there and received child number five into our family.
“We packed up our house into a container and flew our family with 5 children between the ages of 2 and 10 into the unknown…”
Then something interesting happened. I was concerned that our little church on the outskirts of Tacoma truly understood the call upon everyone in the church to mission and witness to the gospel – whether across town or across an ocean. And as I preached through the Gospel of Matthew, I became convicted by his word that we too, needed to understand and heed God’s call to join him in his mission to reach the least reached.
That led to two years of traveling coast to coast across the USA speaking in churches about the work we would soon do in Lebanon. When all the funds were raised, we packed up our house into a container and flew our family with 5 children between the ages of 2 and 10 into the unknown - to a country we had only ever spent 10 days in before.
We spent a total of six years in Lebanon. Staying six years in one place was a new record for us. But even during those six years we couldn’t seem to stay put. We lived on the twenty-third floor of a high-rise in Beirut for only a year before we moved and spent two years serving with a church in a remote village near the southern border. I taught at two different schools in our first three years. We spent our final three years in the southern coastal city of Tyre serving with a church-plant there. I was also working on another master’s degree in Beirut, this time in Islamic Theology and Philosophy, which kept me commuting three to four hours twice a week during our entire time living in southern Lebanon.
“I needed an experience akin to George Bailey’s encounter with Clarence, the angel, in order to see things differently.”
We had come to be utter nomads. In all, we had moved house seventeen times in twenty-one years of marriage! We no longer knew what it was like to really live in the place where we physically resided. For all of my national and international pursuits I had missed the great blessings that are reserved for the one who puts down roots and gives back to the community that had invested so much in one’s early years. I needed an experience akin to George Bailey’s encounter with Clarence, the angel, in order to see things differently.
It came in the form of an observation of the growing irony my life and work had become. In my heart of hearts, I knew I am called to serve as a shepherd. I spent my time encouraging others to follow Jesus the Good Shepherd. I had been a pastor in America, but in Lebanon my work had to focus on spotlighting the local Lebanese pastors in their own ministries. This focus was based in a strong conviction that the best and most naturally equipped people to lead a country’s churches are local people, not foreign “consultants” like I was as a missionary.
Ah, but there’s the irony. There I was, a pastor from the USA ministering in Lebanon, convinced that the most effective pastors are indigenous pastors. That’s when the question hit me like a Vaudevillian sack of flower, “If this is so, then why wasn’t I pastoring a church where I am indigenous myself?” It was then that I got to work on applying my ministry convictions to my own life.
I sat down with the family and explained why we needed to make another move: God was calling us back to Dearborn. I remember my second son saying, “That makes a lot of sense, dad. Why didn’t we think of that before?” Good question, son! So, our family of seven set a course for our hometown and landed there once again, this time with the intention to put down deep roots, to hang up our hats and coats and stay awhile.
We returned to Dearborn with new eyes to see and appreciate just what a unique and fascinating place it is. I found myself often thanking God for giving me another chance at loving my hometown. People used to ask me, “Aren’t you concerned about how Jesus taught that ‘A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives?’” (Mark 6:4) This made me nervous at first until it occurred to me that I have nothing to worry about because I am no prophet! I’m only a servant-shepherd of the church.
So, we returned in an attempt to be that more mature version of George Bailey at the end of the movie. We wanted to have an intentional impactful presence in our home community for the gospel. We realized that we “really had a wonderful life” there. We decided to be a blessing to the city and the people who had been such a blessing to us.
In that season we raised and launched each of our kids into adulthood, (now they’re starting their own families!). We worked for 11 years at paying down a mortgage and planting Christ Community Church I spent time working on an old sailboat with my dad (now in his 80’s) and finishing a Doctor of Ministry degree. Christie got involved in local homeschool coops, hosting Bible studies in our home every week, taking kids to local youth theater productions, and leading events with our neighborhood association. Every summer we were either sailing on Lake Erie near my parents home or taking boys to baseball games. We were blooming right where I had originally been planted.
“Seeing God’s heart in God’s word and aligning your heart to His heart will lead each believer on to a very different adventure of discovering how one’s small story fits into God’s big story.“
This is something I need to emphasize: as I describe our small story and how it seems to fit into God’s Big Story, it may seem like we are lifting up our own particular experience as an example for everyone. Nothing could be further from our desire.
Seeing God’s heart in God’s word and aligning your heart to His heart will lead each believer on to a very different adventure of discovering how one’s small story fits into God’s big story. First, this is because everyone is called to join him in his purpose for this world. Every disciple is called to make disciples. The Great Commission of Matthew 28:18-20 to “go and make disciples of all nations…” is not just for missionaries. Colin Marshall and Tony Payne put it well in their book, The Trellis and the Vine:
Traditionally…[the Great Commission] has been read as a missionary mandate, a charter for sending out gospel workers to the world. However, this can lead local churches to think that they are obeying the Great Commission if they send money (and missionaries) overseas. But the emphasis of the sentence is not on ‘going’. In fact, the participle is probably better translated “when you go” or “as you go”. The commission is not fundamentally about mission out there somewhere else in another country. It’s a commission that makes disciple-making the normal agenda and priority of every church and every Christian disciple. [Collin Marshall and Tony Payne, The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mind-Shift that Changes Everything (Kingsford, Australia: Mathias Media, 2009), 13]
One of my closest friends is a friend I’ve known since our early seminary days 30 years ago. In all that time that our family was traveling all around the world, he and his family have been serving at the same church in the same small farming community in Ohio. There have been joys and challenges. But our friends have been faithfully preaching the gospel, week in and week out, making an impact in the same place. These friends of ours are a couple of our heroes in the faith! You may be called across the street, or across town, or across an ocean. The mandate is the same: to make disciples of Christ. Are you making disciples? It is the heart of God that you do. And when you align your heart with the heart of God, which calls his people to make disciples of all ethnic groups wherever they are, you will find yourself on an amazing adventure of following Jesus into the unknown and trusting him for his guidance and provision.
For us, God soon opened the door through an international training ministry to take annual, then twice-annual trips back to Lebanon and many other places around the Mediterranean region to train pastors in hermeneutics (the study of God’s word for the ministry of preaching and teaching). God gave me the opportunity to be an indigenous pastor and an international missionary at the same time!
“We are still discovering how our small story fits into God’s Big Story. How does yours?“
Now, seeing the transformative power of God’s word impact pastors in under-resourced and restricted access countries around the Mediterranean region, I can see why we had the opportunity to be both nomadic and to bloom where we were originally planted. We spent 11 years in Dearborn (a new record for us!). We saw God plant a new church that by his grace held together through COVID. A few years after COVID, we helped Christ Community Church find a new pastor to replace me so we could walk through an open door to pursue the work of taking training in the Word of God to churches all around the Mediterranean. All our kids have grown up. By October 2024 they will have all gotten married. They live all around the USA and the world. So, we’re going nomadic again!
As new empty-nesters we simply desire to serve God, his gospel purpose, and his church in a way that is best fitted and most joyful for who we are, and most helpful and fruitful for those whom we serve and partner in the time God has allotted us by his grace. As we serve in the Mediterranean Basin training leaders and their churches to discover the heart of God in the word of God we are going nomadic once again. We are still discovering how our small story fits into God’s Big Story. How does yours?
