homecoming

It has been two decades or more.

Just pulling into the parking lot had memories overpowering me in waves.

I remembered the first morning I ever came here. A Sunday morning phone call at a friend’s house after being up a bit too late watching movies. I didn’t have much room for God or church at that young age of 15 after watching my mom slowly and literally eaten away by colon/liver cancer nearly two years before. I was making a feeble effort to at least look rebellious, growing my hair long (anyway as long as I could stand it which ended up being about shoulder length). But when my friend stumbled back into the room saying it was just Russ asking if he wanted to come with them to church, I suddenly sprang up. “I want to go!” I really don’t know why I did – or at least I didn’t at the time. The fact is, when all is said and done, we don’t choose God’s grace; He chooses us. And up I jumped, throwing on my tennis shoes as fast as I could, and getting out the door just in time to intercept Russ and his family in their station wagon driving by. “Can I come with you? I mean I’m not really dressed properly.” And I don’t remember their exact words, but “come as you are, you’ll be loved” is what was communicated – and what I ultimately experienced.

It was a smaller church than I was used to (the Panorama Presbyterian Church seemed to have hundreds of well dressed parishoners every Sunday packed into a huge sanctuary). But did they ever sing! Everyone was singing. And when the Bible was opened it was as if I was hearing it for the first time. And while there was still about a year or so of being drawn in and wooed by the Spirit, the fact is right then I was hooked. Right there in that same sanctuary that I visited today some 35 years later.

Ron and Judy – they were just a young couple starting out then – today they were just about the only faces I recognized of the 25 or so people gathered there. Ron taught me how to put together my first sermons. I think I taught Ron and Judy both a good deal about patience! Home life for me was rough. With my mom gone we were finally moved in with my dad and the woman he’d been seeing – a woman to whom my brother and I were a serious intrusion. Alcohol gave her growing bitterness open and constant expression. So I found myself hanging out a lot at Ron and Judy’s place. I’m sure they gave me many subtle and not so subtle hints that it was time to go, but like a lost and hungry stray, I just wouldn’t leave.

And they just kept loving.

And not just them, but the whole church. I increasingly found myself on the doorsteps of many of them, just showing up and asking if I could hang out with them – particularly during the summer months. I don’t think the retired folks among them knew what to do with a young kid like this showing up at their door, just wanting to “hang out.” And their doors – and arms – swung open wide. They became family to me.

Glenn and Delores Steele. Marvin Steele. Al Steele (lots of Steeles in that church of my youth!). Darrell and Iris Cahhal – Russ’ parents (taught them many lessons in patience too!). Russ’ brother Rex (oh some interesting times we had growing up together in those years). More youth – Connie and Mike Ruppel (had a crush on Connie for a while). Newt and Juanita Owens – a retired couple; Newt wouldn’t have considered himself an educated man, but he had more quiet wisdom and kindness than anyone I had met – a kindness shown in taking this young “orphan” fishing on more than one occasion. Eldon Wilson (“EO”). Police officer in the LAPD. Always pleading for the support of orphans in India. Dated his daughter Eldonna once (we all just called her Donna) – she concluded after one time out I was far too nerdy. Harmon and Reva Thompson. Harmon. Half the time he led the songs, always sitting on the front row, perched and listening. Sitting in that spot he totally threw me off when he said a loud “amen” after my first sentence in my first sermon. It was like hitting a home run on the first pitch, only I didn’t know how to run the bases. But run I did, finishing what I was sure would be a 45 minute sermon, minimum, in less than ten. Harmon gave me my first concordance – a big hardcover Strong’s Concordance. “Use it to explore the riches of the Word,” he wrote. He showed me how, and I did.

I was only there for six years, but they were the years in which in foundational ways my soul was formed and His DNA imparted into my very soul: a love for Jesus, a never ending hunger for the Word, the depeening embrace of family, and grace to abundantly cover the follies and foibles of a young man who often didn’t have much sense.

Stepping into that building this morning, I knew that I wouldn’t see most of their faces. Many of them are long dead. Just about all of the rest have moved and I’ll have to wait for heaven – or Facebook – to catch up with them.

But as I stood singing the hymns of my youth, my heart overflowed with gratitude as the faces and names flooded into my heart and soul. What an indescribable gift is fellowship and family! Shared meals and fights and struggles and victories. I didn’t meet a personal Savior in those days. I met a familial one. Seeing His face in that family, even as I sat there looking back all those years, laid the foundation of Jesus that everyone and everything since can only build upon.

What a gift today to embrace this now aging pastoral couple (notice I didn’t say “old”) – Ron and Judy Collins. Ron will probably never write a book or be written up in church leadership journals; he’ll never have human spotlights flooding around him accompanied by insistent voices asking how he did it. But for four decades they have quietly and humbly labored in the same church and community, faithfully teaching, tirelessly loving – even taking in this tattered orphan.

What a gift today to embrace them – and through them the rest of my family there in years past – and to simply say, “Thank you.”