On Saturday I will leave these beloved islands for two weeks. I am thankful to say I will miss my family and my church very deeply, it’ll tear my heart out. I shall not be able to bear it.
It will slay me every morning to awake in a house outside of Birmingham where the halls don’t echo with children’s feet running at 5:30 am, and enter into a kitchen where milk (or something worse) has not already been spilt (at least twice), and sit down to a quiet dining room to sip hot coffee while I wait for the van to leave for 3rd Presbyterian.
Someone will waltz into my homesickness and I will lift my eyes hopefully like one of Pavlov’s dogs only to see not my sweet wife nor a sleepy Brians kid but John Ahern or Caleb Skogen, “oh, it’s just you…” I shall mutter into my coffee mug. For all of the joy that friends like John or Caleb bring me, they are no rivals to home.
I will worship with churches which I love dearly and where many good friends welcome me into their fellowship, but it will not be All Saints Honolulu. Sure, they will have their deacons around but they will not be our deacons, James and Dawson and Ben and David. Sure, they will have Holy Communion, but their port will not have been purchased at the Longs in Kailua nor will their bread have been cooked by one of the ladies of our altar guild.
I have good friends in Birmingham, but they are not the lovely messy life-on-life raggamuffin saints that compose our parish family. Peter Leithart, for instance is tall and lordly and fatherly but not in the way that Chuck Lynde is tall and fatherly and lordly; and although Drew Knowles and Laura Clawson are super cool, they're not Emma Freedman or Sierra Loo or Albert Banh levels of cool. There’s great musicians there (my friend Nathan Davy will be doing a performance of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations [BWV 988]), but there’s a noticeable dearth of music played by Kaleo Agsalda or the Quitevises. Aand nowhere I go over the next two weeks will have a cajon played by Spencer Lemer, jokes told by Elliot Bruno, or scripture readings read by Corrine Wong.
The food’s great, impossibly good, but none of it will be made by Rachel Brians. And none of the wine I will drink will be shared with Matthew Darby nor will any of it risk being spilt by a Dyland Anders chasing a Dickens kid.
I could go on for a while. The list above hardly scratches the surface of all the folks the mainland lacks whom I will dearly miss, but you get the gist.
Here’s the point: I am very grateful to have a family that I hate being away from. And I am very grateful, also, to have a church family that I hate being away from. God is so good to have placed me in these communities. Thanks be to God! What a joyful thing this pain is. It is a sign of the pleasantness of the places where the boundaries have fallen for me.
And if you’re one of these folks whom I will be leaving for two weeks know that I love you all and will be praying for you.
May Christ richly bless you and may He be faithful to reunite us soon.
Grace and peace to you all,
Mark+