TRANSPLANT

Long time since my last post. It's been a rather busy time here. I went to Germany for a few weeks and as soon as I came back they announced the base closure. Since then I've been hugely busy shutting down the squadron and packing it up as well as working my assignment back to Vegas. Moving has made me think of how transient some of us are...

My dad worked at the same job in the same place for thirty years. My in-laws have lived in the same house for about that same length of time. So, my first thought was all this change is not normal. That it's only a small group of us who are so transient. However, if you look at our history, uprooting from one place and transplanting ourselves to another is a big part of the American experience. The earliest settlers were transplants from Europe who moved on to find a better life. Once here, they had a passion to expand this nation and moved west into the Ohio River Valley. I was born there.

In the 1930s farmers from middle-America got "dusted out" and left everything to pursue survival on the west coast. As farming became more and more difficult to make a living from, Americans moved to the cities for factory work by the thousands. In the 40s, a similar thing happened to coal in Kentucky and West Virginia. That's how I came to be born in the Ohio Valley.

I chose a life of constant change and upheaval. I moved from Ohio to Montana in 1992. After several more moves I ended up in Las Vegas. We went to church in a high school cafeteria one Sunday morning and the name of the pastor in the bulletin looked familiar. We sat in the back and could barely see the preacher, but I knew exactly who he was when I heard his lame joke about cars in the bible. He was also a transplant. We had met in Ohio years before. Later, I met a young lady in the church (Debbie). She was from Indiana and happened to know a friend I had met in MT. Oh, and her husband (Joe) was in the same youth group as a friend of mine from college. To top it all off, that youth group was led by the pastor with the lame car joke (Kevin). The connections continue and continue and demonstrate that transience is a large part of who we Americans are.

But it goes deeper than that. It's not just Americans who are transient. God transplanted Adam and Eve after they sinned. Abram was transplanted when he followed God's call to go. The nation of Israel which seems so tied to the land, have been transplanted again and again. Babylon, Egypt, etc. Even Jesus was transient. My lovely wife likes to say, "The joy is in the journey." and,"Life is a journey not a destination." I think she's on to something. What if the Kingdom of God is not a destination we're traveling towards, but a journey we're on together. I know a lot of you get that. Some of you may not understand life in the body that way, but I think it's just so. In fact, I think it's both. It's a journey with our brothers and sisters AND a destination that we strive towards. It's the destination part that I don't completely understand, but I think it's got gold-paved streets and such.