Our oldest daughter and her husband are buying a house this summer. And our youngest daughter is buying a house.  My best friend and his wife are buying their retirement home.  Everyone is buying a house.  Which got me thinking about home ownership.  

As a United Methodist pastor, Cheryl and I do not own a home.  We move from parsonage to parsonage.  That is, homes owned by the church we serve.  We have lived in big and small, old and new.  We have lived downtown and in the middle of a hay field.  As soon as we have two couches, one for a family room and one for the living-room, we move to a house with no family room.  We have had a house with a parlor and one with a wall furnace for the upstairs.  We lived in a home with only one shower and one with a back staircase (servant stairs), though we never saw the servants.  And they never served us a thing.  Neither did they clean.  

Our newest home was eight years old when we moved in and our oldest was one hundred and two.  We lived in a parsonage that was attached to the church.  You stepped through the air lock from the family room to the church office.  So, one year many Christmas ornaments were hung on our tree with paper clips.  They went right through the air lock. 

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For four years we lived in a cottage, not a house.  Very small, I mean, it was the only house I ever saw that looked smaller with the furniture out of the rooms than with furniture in the rooms.  I don’t even know how that is possible. 

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One of the three bedrooms was only eight feet wide.  You had to walk into the room in the direction you were going to lie down on the bed because there wasn’t enough room to turn around.  One parsonage had a marble fireplace in the master bedroom.

Abraham and Sarah were sojourners and Jesus had no were to lay his head.  We have been blessed to live in the church house.  It is fun, never boring and always reminding you that in the end we rely on God, not ourselves.

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