Your Starting Place

I love summertime. I love the fact you get to wear as we used to say back in the day. Short pants, flip flops, whatever. For a kid, it's hard to beat summertime because there's no school you're doing all these other kinds of things that are fun to do. It makes you free in some ways. Chapter 7 in the book known that Ruth and I wrote some years back talks about where does one story start? Everyone's story has a starting place and where it starts, of course, is now a place of memory for us. Somebody asked me what my earliest memory was or is. I would have to say it would be June 10, 1945 when I was a couple months past three years old. How do you know that? Well, my parents who had lived in Oakland, California where I was brought up for those first three years went overseas as missionary educators at the end of World War II and we were in New York City on June 10, 1945. And we've just come through this weekend called Memorial Day Weekend where we hold in memory those who have given the last full measure of devotion for the sake of the nation. And I find it interesting that might not even be the right word for me that my earliest memory had some military connotation in the sense of marching bands and soldiers and all of that. June 10, 1945 was the largest parade, I believe this is accurate, that New York City has ever seen millions of people literally on the streets as this parade wound through all of the burrows of New York. And it was because a man representing the war effort, if you will, was coming home from Europe. His name was Dwight David Eisenhower and seven years later he would be elected president of the United States. I'm a three year old kid with my parents on Fifth Avenue in New York as they honor him just weeks before Nazi Germany had surrendered and some weeks later the Japanese would surrender in Tokyo Bay. But he came home as a victor representing that victory and coming down Fifth Avenue standing up in the back of the car waving his hands with a V for victory he represented for many in the world at that time what it meant for victory of good over evil. And it's interesting for me that that's one of my earliest memories because it had such a power for a little guy and I'm sort of looking between people's needs as it were my dad had to lift me up so I could see. But your starting place for story is your earliest memory and that's why the challenges when folks get dementia Alzheimer when the memory goes away it takes relationships away as well but that's a story for another day let's jump into the chapter called your starting place. Indeed our story is finally all any of us owns because as I once told my grandson a story has only one master Frank Delaney Ireland. earliest memories are the starting place for every relationship we will ever have. The bassoon bellow from high above the water line was unforgettable the MS Gripsome sounder to whistle as she backed out of her birth in Jersey City Harbor in route to the Mediterranean it was September of 1945 and I was three years old that's one of my first memories. Each person story has a beginning and it's found in first memories just the size of the world sets it up when we're small all things are huge in every adult a giant first impressions of the order of the day as we grow up. Life is a series of firsts a first ballgame a first day of school a first friend a first house a first sibling a first broken book a first airplane ride it goes on and on our early years of the first chapters of our biographies. Dr. Dan Allender and his insightful book to be told God invites you to co author your future explains why our personal stories are the main building blocks for friendship he says that the telling and writing of your own story is critical to understanding your entire life. Most of us have spent more time studying a map to avoid getting lost on a trip than we have studying our life so we'll know how to proceed into the future. Our story is truer than any other reality we know when I study and understand my life story I can then join God as a co author. Who am I and where was I or the same question I don't know when I first grappled with the core question who am I what I do know is that I've asked it lots of times since then and I know that it's connected to another question where do I come from. There are two sides of the same coin where I come from is a huge part of who I am ask any Texan or Irishman any Chinese business person or Armenian farmer ask an only child or someone with eight siblings where I come from really influences how I see myself. Think of the stories you pay money to see the great stories of stage and screeners centered in a where. From Leemez Arab to Westside story from Shindler's list of Hamilton the geographic roots of the lead characters life set the stage for everything that follows. Narrative always starts with a where God gives Adam and Eve a where at the start of the grand story it is a garden called Eden and their job is to be horticulturalist. The only exception was a single tree in the middle of the garden the command was simple don't eat from it. They thought a tiny bite wouldn't hurt and there you go. Knowledge dawns and the great alone begins to nibble at them and then the God who has designed them for relationship comes for a visit. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden but the Lord God called to the man. Where are you? He answered I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked so I hid. Adam and Eve have crossed the line and know it. Seeing their naked they run for cover behind a tree like children putting a blanket over their heads thinking the parent cannot see. God is looking. Adam and Eve are hiding. Really? This is God for pizza. And with a rhetorical question God calls Adam out where are you the question needs reflection not a response he knows very well where Adam is. It's Adam who doesn't know where he is. Adam and Eve's disobedience disorients their lives and muddies their identity it costs them the where that makes sense of things knowing your where is an organizing piece of your life. It is essential to your story. The simple practice of asking the where questions about your own story is the seed bed for future friendship. Coming back to Alex Haley's story for a moment there is a scene from the original Roots miniseries that sticks with me to this day. Kuntikintay has a daughter named Kizzy who is courted by an American born slave named Sam. Ultimately she decides not to marry him when asked why she made that decision her answer reflects a practical wisdom that went something like this. Sam named American he don't know Africa he can't understand Africa and if you don't know where you comes from you can't know where you going. When I heard those words it was a moment it was so counterintuitive that it felt like the Bible simply put if you want to go forward you need to glance in the rear view mirror. Looking back to move forward let's look at the where of our lives where we come from experientially really shapes us and part of that is the where of the geography and the cultures we come from. Ruth and I come from neighboring but different ethnic roots she is French English German and Scots Irish I am German and Scots Irish her people came to Virginia North Carolina and ended up in California my people came to Michigan in Kansas and ended up in California it is in those facts that she and I find our place. Ruth and I took a trip to the British Isles in 1992 to check out our roots to be clear checking out roots is often what people do when they've traveled a bunch of times around the sun and have more years behind them than ahead of them. Though we may not always recognize that I believe we intuitively want to know our historical where no matter what our age on that trip we discovered a delightful thing the challenge in our search had been where to start on the ground our ancestors left their countries of origin in the 1700s and 1800s and to their families and friends they might as well have fallen off the face of the earth because they were illiterate and couldn't ride home. So two centuries later Ruth and I were there on a hunt for connections Google and ancestry dot com didn't exist back then so we had gone to the Sutro library in San Francisco and the National Archives in Washington DC to research the country of Ruth's family origins Scotland it was. With that information in hand we headed out to see if we could find the people from our past how do you do that in a practical way well we had a crazy idea. It was a thought that no self-respecting young person would ever think of we've been told. With a local phone book in hand we decided to look up someone with Ruth's family name and we called call that number to see what would happen. The delightful thing we discovered was this the family name worked like magic. We could pick any Blakely out of the book and upon calling be invited to lunch or tea what fun we could literally eat our way across Scotland. In a village just north of air on Scotland Southwest Coast I found one of those cool and quaint phone booths on a downtown corner. We had a system Ruth found the name of the phone book and I made the call. I was calling a Blakely whom we've been told might have some information when he answered I said that we were exploring our roots and asked if he could help. Where did you to people settled he asked in a lovely Scottish burrow north of Knoxville Tennessee I said. My people went to Pennsylvania he said. What did they do? He asked. I think they were weavers. My people were miners. Can you tell me anything more about them? He said. Well I said the record show that in 1801 two of the Blakely men got thrown out of pop pop Baptist church on the banks of the wholeston river for drinking and fighting. Or upon Mr Blakely exclaimed. I think we may be related. Geography and friendship. Places connect and define us. Geography is the study of the physical features of the earth in its atmosphere and of human activity as it affects and is affected by these. Including the distribution of populations and resources land use in industry. Oh to have been an explorer back in the day. What must it have been like to make a pencil sketch of a coastline from the quarter deck of a Spanish frigate in the 1600s. Or sail through what then were called the sandwich islands and we know today is Hawaii. Growing up I used to say give me the National Geographic and the Bible and I'm good. Those two works opened up the whole universe to my young dreaming mind because I found where I was and who I was in both places. A friend of ours says that the grand story is about places and people. Places tell the story of people from the Garden of Eden to the heavenly city and the place names really do focus the story don't they? The tale is told by recounting what happened at the Red Sea Mount Sinai Bethlehem Golgotha Jerusalem and the Damascus Road. Not long after arriving in Washington DC I was thinking through how to tell the story of Jesus in this place where power and poverty live side by side. It is one of the few cities in the world designed to be the capital of a country. It really is three overlapping cities. The district is comprised of the folks who live and work within its limits and for whom it is home. Then there's the federal capital which most of us think of when we say Washington DC. Finally there's the international community living in the embassies of more than 175 nations, many of which are clustered along the length of Massachusetts Avenue Northwest. So how do you tell this Jesus story across all those lines of ethnicity, politics, and religion? It came to me as a study in where? I can't point to a moment but over some days this imaginary conversation got framed in my head. Jesus says, both, here's the plan. I'll leave my place. I'll come to your place. I'll take your place. Then we'll go to my place. Whether your place happens to be an elegant residence on Embassy Row in DC or a Roach-infested urban project building, it makes not one wit of difference to him. Regardless of where you find yourself, God will go there to meet you every time. If the grand story is all about heaven come to earth and the creator of the universe showing up in a cradle, we should not be surprised then that a friendship might begin with a geographic question. So where are you from originally? So that question, where is home for you originally, was not my original question when I started thinking about friendship? I actually started asking this question. So where were you born and raised? Until one day I was in a Washington DC hotel with some friends and had a British friend there who had been a captain in the cold stream guards. Those are some of the folks who guard the Queen of England, Big Bear Skin hats, all that stuff. And I said to my friend Anthony, so Anthony, where were you born and raised? And he's very British and he said, Dick, I was not raised. Pigs are raised. I was brought up. So ever since then, after that I started to say, where were you born and brought up? But more recently, I think distilled or refined it a little more to this question that we just heard in the chapter, where is home for you originally? Each of us has a home somewhere that where we came from, correct? I mean, no matter what kind of home it was, maybe we were even raised in foster care or in an orphanage. But home for me originally sets a space and a tone for a conversation that really informs others about who we are and we learn about others and who they are from that place they began. So catch you next time and I look forward to that. God bless, catch you later. you