Karl and Debbie Together

The Swahili proverb Waendao wawili hukumbushana means "Two walking together cause each other to remember".

Our lives have intertwined and grown together for many years.  Our engagements have often been different, yet deeply connected.  This is the theme of our past, and of our future.  It is our journey.  It is also has been your journey with us for many years.  As we walk together in the future, we want to “cause you remember” God’s work, His plan, His hope in a broken world.  And we need you to “cause us remember” our greatest goal.  

In our family and ministry posts we want you to have a look inside our hopes and dreams and walk with us in the aspirations for our family and labors

Home

Baseball season is just over in the US, and there was a lot of focus on the “home plate”, or the start and stop place of the sport.  We have a grandson who cannot get enough of catching at that home plate.  In these last weeks we have watched four grandchildren migrate to their various colleges from “home” and now making plans to “go home” for thanksgiving.  It is sort of their start and stop at this point of life.

When I left for college way back in 1967, I never returned to the house in Denver where I grew up.  Instead I went “home” to where my family had relocated in Atlanta.  When our children left our home in Kenya and went to college, they wondered what to write on the line that asked for a “home address”.  We didn’t know either.  So sometimes “home” shifts its location.

When we gather with our residents in the International House Baltimore for dinner we talk about home and they share stories of home. But for our Palestinian resident home seems now an impossibility. Our Brazilian resident says, “I want to stay in my new home”

  So what is home?

Some years ago we decided that “Home” was where most of our family was. But now we find that most of us have many kinds of family. There is the immediate family, and the extended family. The close family and the estranged family. The natural family and the welcomed family.

We have left our “family home” of the last 20 years. The beautiful victorian row home in Baltimore was the place to which we returned more than any other in all our years. Now we join a “town” of 2000 other senior citizens in a senior living “home for life”. It frees us from preparing all our meals and doing house repairs and paying many monthly bills (just one big one :) It frees us to focus on creating new relationships and to maintain old ones. It frees us to write and to travel for the King in new ways. Home became bigger.

We will visit immediate family and extended family. Close family and estranged family. We will welcome new faces and lives into our family and find more family around the world. Family grows bigger.

Our relationship with Mission to the World as our home base will change. As of December we will no longer receive any salary, but will still have an open account to pay for some travel costs. You will see at the bottom of this post both the MTW button as well as the Sychar Well button. Sychar Well is where we have been hanging out for a long time with our global peacemaking family. But you don’t have to go to those buttons unless you want to. You can follow us in this post and in the Global Twist posts for our reflections on God at work in the world. The posts will come to your email box until you unsubscribe.

4Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,
for you judge the peoples with equity
and guide the nations upon earth. Selah
5Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you! Ps 67

Karl and Debbie Together….reflecting on God in brokenness