Becoming a Homeowner, The Gift of Stability, and The Desire to Wander

Lindsay and I purchased our first home a few weeks ago. People, when they hear about it, usually say, "Congratulations!" But I was not all that excited. It's a house. To me that means that it comes with a lot of strings attached. Now, I will have to spend my days worrying about how to take care of it. When something major breaks, I will have to have the money to fix it. Living in town means that I will have to take better care of my lawn. There are a lot of burdens that come with owning a house. Home ownership seems more like a mixed drink, a money pit mixed with emotional and physical drain, that when imbibed will consume my life.

Becoming a homeowner was something that I never intended to do. I had hoped that I could be a wanderer, to see the world, to continue moving and never settle down, meet many different and interesting people, and to have some exciting bohemian adventures along the way. Now, that dream is ending, and I am establishing a home. I guess it is about time with four children and another one on the way, but I imagined that we could be some happy traveling hippy clan.

To be honest, I have always had this arrogant streak that thought that not owning a home was more spiritual. I still wrestle with it, especially when I am having trouble on an improvement project at the house. Jesus, as far as we know, did not own a home, and, of course, I want to be like Jesus. I assumed that it would be more Christlike to not have the worries of a house in my life. All the time, I missed the point that being like Jesus is more than being carefree, having long hair, wearing sandals, and not owning a home. I have tried all that, and it has not made me more of who God has designed me to be. Being like Jesus is about taking on the characteristics of Jesus in all areas of my life.

John wrote, "By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked" [1 John 2:5-6 (ESV)]. To be his followers, we need to walk the way he walked. This doesn't mean that I have to walk with some gansta limp because I assume that Jesus had a vicious gansta limp to show how cool he was. It is about an attitude of love in our lives. John goes on to explain, "Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes" [1 John 2:10-11 (ESV)]. John is not just talking about our biological brothers and sisters; he is talking about neighbors and everyone that we encounter. We can walk like Jesus while we are wandering sojourners, and we can walk like Jesus when we are planted firmly in a community. Each one has its own drawbacks and unique sets of opportunities. The key to walking like Jesus is to love all the people around us.

With that said, I have realized that my calling is to be planted firmly within a community. You might have a similar calling. Then again, you might be called to be a wanderer, or you might be ignoring your calling completely. Within that specific calling, we must never forget our larger calling: we are called to love everyone around us.

I have to learn to shift gears and look at how to love God while being firmly planted in one location. Rose Marie Berger wrote in her article, The Art of Householding, "The 'gift of stability' is considered the fourth vow in Orthodox and Benedictine monastic life. Poverty, chastity, and obedience are the 'evangelical vows' that make one radically available to those in need of the gospel. Stability, as Thomas Merton put it, means to 'find the place that God has given you and take root there.'"

In Wendell Berry's 10 Hopes, he explains, "Love your neighbors - not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have." That, my friends, is much easier said than done.

You might be called to put your roots down. It might be to start going to church or stop church shopping and become part of a flawed spiritual community. Flawed because every spiritual community is. It might be to become part of an organization despite not agreeing with them on every point. We don't even agree with ourselves from five years ago on every point. It might be to stop wandering and to permanently move into a community despite it not having everything you want. Out here in the rural Midwest, no town will have everything we want. Whatever the case, putting your roots down is about building healthy and authentic relationships with the people around you. Together, we can do much more than we can do alone.

We need to invest in relationships. Our world in five years will only be as good as the investment we make in it today. You want a better church, a better organization, a better town, a better state, and a better nation, it starts by building a better relationship with your neighbor.

It has never been my desire to ever be firmly planted in a community. One thing that my wife has always blessed me with in our marriage, despite all of my kicking, screaming, and arguing against it, is stability. In this case, like many times in my relationship with her, I must realize that what she wants is actually better for us. That is the beauty of good relationships. It is not always about our individual selves, but in chasing after collective happiness we will find that we are happy individually.

The Desert Cross, World War I, and the Justification of War

The Sojourners posted a great, brief article and a Colbert clip on the Desert Cross controversy.

How the Desert Cross once looked:

How it looks now:


I find it disturbing for a cross to be a war memorial, especially during WWI in which both sides claimed to on the God's side.

During WWI, an American preacher gave a passionate sermon in which he said, “ It is God who has summoned us to this war. It is his war we are fighting...the greatest in history—the holiest. It is in the profoundest and truest sense a Holy War....Yes, it is Christ, the king of Righteousness, who calls us to grapple in deadly strife with this unholy and blasphemous power [Germany].” The dilemma with a statement such as this is that “inscribed on the belts and helmets of the men fighting for this 'unholy and blasphemous power' was the slogan, 'Gott mit uns' (God [be] with us), and their greatest wartime motto, inscribed on scores of monuments to their dead, to be covered by the ruins of a second World War was, 'Fuer Gott und Vaterland' (for God and country). On whose side was God?” [1].

On whose side was God?

One of the dilemmas of war is that every side believes they are on the morally righteous side. Albert Keim and Grant Stoltzfus, two prominent CO historians, wrote:

This view [just war]...is today the essence of the war ethic of most Christian groups. Implicitly, of course, it contains an alternative to war; if the war to be waged is an unjust war, the Christian alternative is not to participate. Unfortunately very few Christians through the centuries have rejected war on the grounds that it was unjust. Virtually all wars have been 'just' wars [2].

WWI, in the end, had no righteous winner. Americans were not quick to stand up and declare the war a just war although it was sold to them as such. Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes, a historian from Columbia University, noted that none of the stated reasons for entering the first world war were achieved. Americans had been sold a basket of lofty ideals that more resembled deception after the war. Prior to WWII, Barnes wrote:

We are all familiar enough with the myths that we believed in the first war. We were taught that our intervention was the only thing that could prevent Germany from conquering the world. We were informed that we were saving the world from further carnage and the rule of brute force. Finally, we were led to believe that we were fighting for noble ideals which would set up a new era in human civilization. On every point our experience in the first World War proved a tragic disappointment and disillusionment...By entering the first World War we did not save the world. We only made possible the smashing victory of the Allies which produced the fatal peace treaties...Not a single major ideal of wartime was realized [3].

This animosity toward war because of the false bag of goods sold during WWI crept up in the discussions prior to America entering WWII. The dominant thought against joining another war in Europe raged through America in the late 30s. Former President Hoover gave a statement in a speech on peace that was representative of the thoughts of many Americans in 1939 prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the United States entry into WWII:

Last night I referred to the suffering of women and children in the Great War...For years it was my sole occupation to care for the homeless, the foodless, the frightened, and the helpless. I have witnessed their sufferings in twenty nations. And when one speaks to me of war, I do not see the glorious parade of troops marching to the tunes of gay music. I do not think of great statesmen planning and worrying in their chancelleries. Nor do I think of those dazzling chambers where the peacemakers of the world meet to settle the affairs of mankind. I see the faces of hungry, despaired, and terrorized women and children. These are the real victims of modern war. The violence of war is year by year falling more and more horribly upon the civilian populations. Starvation by blockade and killing from the air have become weapons of attack in modern war. At least they have become methods of reprisals. Put bluntly that means wholesale killing of women and children [4].

War had been revealed during WWI as a new beast in the modern age with advanced military technology. In war, especially with air warfare, women and children die. Bombs did not distinguish between the warrior and the civilian. Blockades caused advanced industrial societies to starve since much of their food needs to be imported. The victims of this starvation were not the military or government leaders; they would be first in line to receive food. “All over Europe it was the women and children who, weakened from scanty food supplies, died not in hundreds of thousands but in millions” [5]. The new weapons of war—bombing, blockading, and complete mobilization of industrial society—caused whole societies rather than just the men to become participants and victims in war [6].

In modern warfare, can any war be just?

[1] Quoted in Mennonite General Conference, Peace Problems Committee, The Churches and War, (Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1956), 16.

[2] Albert Keim and Grant Stoltzfus, The Politics of Conscience, Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1988, 19.

[3] Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes, Common Sense Neutrality, ed. Paul Comly French ( New York: Hastings House, 1939), 14-15.

[4] President Herbert Hoover, Common Sense Neutrality, ed. Paul Comly French ( New York: Hastings House, 1939), 110-111.

[5] Ibid, 111.

[6] Ibid, 111-113