It was a Good Home

As of 11AM this Friday–and assuming there are no ill-placed tornadoes in the next two days–we will no longer own a home in Oklahoma.

I drove up to Tulsa earlier this week to get the last bit of our stuff from the house we’ve owned for the past seven years. Even though we’ve been living in Austin for almost a year now, it has felt as if the move were incomplete. It’s hard to feel like you’ve relocated when you keep sending money back to your old home.

Spending a couple of nights in our old house put me in a nostalgic mood.

When we arrived in Tulsa just over seven years ago, we brought with us two sizes of diapers, along with a newborn and toddler to fill them. We came to Tulsa with so much hope and anticipation. I was a “young preacher” back then. I had been given the opportunity to work with a church with a storied (and troubled) past. Along with the job came an opportunity to coordinate one of the largest gatherings of adults in our network of churches. It was a highly visible position. The day I took the job my circle of influence expanded exponentially. It was a heady time for an twenty-nine year old who up until then had been working with a small church in a hidden corner of the Pacific Northwest.

Six years later, Tulsa was no longer a city of opportunity, hope, and promise. Instead it had become a place of intense disappointment, frustration, and discouragement. I’ve spent a lot of time processing what happened and I’m still not sure I understand it all, but I do know this: if everything had gone well, I wouldn’t have learned anything. But with the way everything went down, I learned quite a bit. There are so many crazy stories that can be told from my six years in Tulsa. Some of the stories I want to tell, but can’t. Some of the stories I can tell, but won’t. Some of them I will tell when the time is right.

As I watched the sunset in my driveway on a near perfect Oklahoma evening, these were not the stories upon which I found myself dwelling. Instead, I looked down the long street in front of our house where both of my boys learned to ride their bikes. I walked up the steep driveway where the boys and I would lie back and look into the sky and wait for the first star to appear on warm summer nights. I stood in front of the swing set I spent two and a half days putting together one spring. I stood behind the the swings where I would push the boys over and over again until they finally learned to swing themselves. I closed my eyes and heard the echoes of giggles still bouncing from tree to tree, just like the ball we used when the neighborhood kids came over for kickball.

The next morning I made one last pass through the house before locking it up for the last time, and each room unlocked a memory. The living room was where we opened our presents on Christmas mornings. The boys’ room, now painted a neutral gray, was once a bright arena where dinosaurs and light sabers clashed.The upstairs family room was where we spent most of our time. It was the place for toys, TV, and hobbies. The final stop was our bathroom, where I would sit for hours in the jetted-tub reading, praying, and practicing my sermons. Every Saturday night I would fill that tub and baptize the jokes I was planning to tell the next day.

We loved living in that house. It was a great place to potty train boys, paint a canvas, and watch Jack Bauer save the world. (Heather did the painting; I did the TV watching.) There were mornings when I didn’t want to leave and there were days when I couldn’t wait to get back to it in the evening. It was a safe place to be.

Our six years in Tulsa were difficult. They changed us. They matured us. Things certainly didn’t go the way we hoped they would when we arrived.

In spite of all that, when I think about all that happened in our home, I’m thankful for the time God gave us there.

I’m also thankful that after being on the market for nearly fifteen months, we finally sold the thing!