Joe B.'s Blog | A Pastor Reflects on Home

After over 3 months now of living in Charlotte with my mother and stepfather, Jodi and I finally just closed on a town house. They are stuck with us for a few more weeks while we wait for our Georgia-stored stuff to join us in North Carolina. We are excited about achieving our goal of some serious empty nest downsizing that we probably never would have gotten around to doing if we had not moved out of Atlanta. We are going to learn how hard that is when our stored stuff proves to be too much stuff even though we worked really hard to give away or throw away as much as we could before we packed. We are VERY excited we will be within short walking distance from my brother and my sister-in-law. Actually, that excitement is really about their three young kids who will have an uncle and an aunt nearby with no busy roads to cross when they decide to run away from home someday for an afternoon—or when they need me to run over to read a bedtime story because my brother is not doing it rig...

I just wanted to watch the game. My alma mater, Davidson College, was playing St. Bonaventure in the A10 tournament semi-finals on a channel my mother does not get. Yes, that’s right, I am a 51 year-old boomerang kid living in my mother’s house until we close on our new place. Thank God for awesome and patient step-fathers! Anyway, I headed to a local establishment with lots of TVs, but a cursory glance did not reveal one to be on the right channel. I asked the hostess if there was one I could sit in front of to watch the Davidson game. She replied, “There is a viewing party in the back room.” (Sigh.) I love watching basketball and particularly coach Bob McKillop’s Wildcat teams and really prefer to watch alone free from conversations that might distract me from witnessing a perfect back pick or intelligent help defense away from the ball. Poor at multi-tasking, I can’t watch a game and attend to those around me and do much more than see the ball go in or miss and the score change...

January 14 was my first Sunday and sermon at Sardis Presbyterian. Leading up to that, I had been wondering who would show up. Frankly, every Sunday I wonder if anyone will show up! These days there are so many other possibilities for a Sunday morning and most of them are more interesting than one of my sermons. (Thank God for sanctuary choirs and worship bands!) But on January 14, I figured the “new pastor bump” would come into play and that attendance numbers bolstered by curious members would be further augmented by the new pastor having a lot of family in town who would feel obligated to visit Sardis and maybe some old friends would be there, too. Members, family, and friends did, indeed, show up in force and it was one of the most exciting days of my life.   It has been a wonderfully strange month as I have experienced in equal measure the excitement of newness and overwhelming nostalgia. Those two things do not usually happen simultaneously. God has been blessing me with...

Everything looks different than it did in 1985—but you know that. There are new office complexes, retail shops, and residential developments taking the place of whatever it was that used to be there that I suspect I would have recognized. The big football field is supposed to be Memorial Stadium. Where did the A&P go? But in the midst of the unfamiliar surroundings of my old home city, I always can spot a church that looks just the way I remembered it. I am trying to decide if that is comforting or concerning, but the comforting part is taking the initial lead. Of course, a church is not constructed of brick and mortar, but of the people who gather there for worship and of the things their faith leads them to do there and when they step out into the community. It has been overwhelming in every good way to find myself back in the Charlotte community and seeing these familiar churches has made me realize how deeply many churches mattered in my life before I committed my profession...