I drove the long way home after breakfast up the Valley this morning.
My path across our gorgeous Valley often finds me taking the indirect route these days. I all but groan in awe as the car or the bike carries me across the sinuous lines and rolling fields that are bordered on one side by blue-green Berry’s Mountain and on the other by Mahantonga Mountain. Even in early winter, the rectangled fields that are laid across these hills like a green-gold quilt over a sleeping body make driving straight through, from A to Z, a sad idea.
Glory like this requires gentle inspection and a curiosity that turns onto country lanes not yet explored.
|
|
Just after first light, I meandered up the Valley towards Wednesday breakfast with Pastor Allan on Matterstown Road, the little-used string of asphalt that bisects the Valley, a mere mile and a near universe away from the highway that would have made quicker work of the journey from Millersburg to E’ville. (If you call it ‘Elizabethville’, you’re not from around here. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
I choose the hour in order to appreciate the Amish children heading to one of the two Amish schools that I pass along the way. The children of neighbors closest to the school walk along the road in little family clusters. Those a little farther off travel in fleets of made-to-size Amish scooters. The children of one pair of families from just beyond scooter range crowds aboard a cart pulled by an eager little pony, who delivers his human cargo and then spends the day munching hay on the edge of the schoolyard. These are frequent fellow travelers of mine, responsive to a friendly wave, stewarding with their parents the same rich soil my ancestors farmed on these green, golden hills in this wide, windy, aromatic valley. |
|
|
One of our two ‘sending churches’, the Wethersfield (Connecticut) Evangelical Free Church, is learning to live sent in New England, a region of this country that for many decades has been resistant to vibrant Christian faith in spite of a history that saw some of its earliest European settlers aspiring to introduce heaven to earth.
Karen and I are learning, too, to live sent.
In our particular case, living sent means learning to love, live in, and give ourselves to multiple homes. It means living both here and there, as though each of these precious places in which our roots so naturally seek deepest penetration were the only place. The only home. Our only peeps. The only ‘ours’.
It means belonging to more than one place that our Maker has given to us, hoping against all our frailty and self-centeredness that He has also given us to those same people and places.
It is an intricate dance. I never know whether it can be understood apart from living it, so I seldom speak of it, rarely attempt to write it down, as now.
I wouldn’t wish it casually on anyone, nor trade it for the world.
|
|
 |
| Great-grandpa John Moses Bear and Grandpa James Baer |
|
In two weeks, Karen and I will make our next move toward one of those other places. As the next leg of our circuitous journey to Colombia, we’ll drive from Pennsylvania to North Carolina for two months of pre-field training at the Center for Intercultural Training.
In the company of others who have been called to live across boundaries, we’ll learn skills as a couple that will help us navigate the cross-currents and surf the waves of our kind of living sent.
Our United World Mission reckons soberly with the fact that cross-cultural ministry is a difficult thing, with challenges that put a megaphone to the garden-variety stresses of everyday life. People in this work are not infrequently chewed up and spat out. They go rogue and damage other human beings. So the policies of UWM wisely require of us this kind of rigorous training before we take our next steps towards Colombia.
We’ll be trained via coursework in Equipping for Cross-Cultural Life and Ministry. Karen will do a segment on Second Language Acquisition. We hope to emerge with a toolbox for cross-cultural adaptation, prepared to thrive as a couple as we live sent in Colombia, Connecticut, and elsewhere. I also plan to become less pig-headed.
Do the rhythms and demands of life make two months in western North Carolina feel like something we have time for?
No.
But this is risky business we’re putting our hand to. If this helps, bring it on.
Just after family celebrations of Christmas and the New Year, we’ll leave for North Carolina from this magnificent, temporary respite-and-preparation haven barely 2.2 miles from the Pennsylvania home in which I grew up, two doors down from the church where the clarity and community of Jesus swept me into his embrace nearly five decades ago, a short walk from old farm houses whose addresses read ‘Hoy Road’, the name I first knew as my Grandma Baer’s maiden name.
Our roots over these months have sunk with uninterrupted satisfaction into this rich, Pennsylvania German soil. It has become, in the way that belies the old adage that you can’t go home again, well, home again. Better put in the light of our particular way of living sent, it’s one of the handful of places we call home.
But we do not own it, cannot grasp it, must in the course of living sent hold such gifts lightly in our hands, must move suitcases and hearts to another place. |
|
Three places fill our hearts and minds at this stage of living sent. These images capture some aspect of each.
- Millersburg, Pennsylvania, our current transitional haven, from which our first sending church (David’s Community Bible Church) will send us to Colombia the first week of May.
- Wethersfield, Connecticut, home of our second sending church (Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church) and our home base for half of each year beginning in 2019.
- Medellín, Colombia, our home and place of service for half of each year, home of the magnificent ministry known as the Biblical Seminary of Colombia.
|
|
|
We have reached
86%
of our financial support goal!
We’d love to reach 100% by
December 31.
Will you consider joining our team over these next few days?
|
|
|
|
This one thing I know (Well, two really …).
When our Lord calls us to service in a particular place, he knits our hearts to it and to its people.
Loving people and their place is not a zero-sum game. It is not necessary to love the people and place we have left any less in order to love the people and place to which we are going more. God’s love is expansive, not restrictive.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Baerly There ... 
Leave a comment