Move Back to Maine

I started out at the Willow House on the Campus of Eastern Nazarene College in the Boston Area. After my parents graduated I was moved to Wareham, Mass. By the time I was a toddler I was a resident of Maine. My mom's family lived in Maine, most of them in the South Portland area. So most of my memories are about being a Mainer. We lived in Eliot, Strong and then in Caribou. I graduated from high school in Caribou. I left Caribou to go "back" to Eastern Nazarene College. I guess I started a pattern of working my way back to where I started. While at college I established one of the first anchoring points for my life. In the angst and struggle that comes with this stage of life, I ran across a paraphrase of Galatians 2:20. It simply said, "For what is life. To me it is Christ."

Have you figured out something to anchor your life when confusion, insecurity, dark nights of the soul comes upon you? Trust me. It makes a difference.

I never went home to live after I went to college. I went back for vacations and such but I needed to work my way through school and I needed a summer job. Loring Air Force Base had plenty of young airman who liked part time jobs and a major employer was the potato farmer. Potato work didn't pick up (pun intended) until the fall and airmen had a lot of the other work. So I ended up working in the Washington DC area. My first summer I worked for a USDA Plant materials center in Maryland. My second summer I worked for a man who had properties in the city of Washing DC. There were lots of life experiences shaping the character of a boy from Maine in those years. DO you understand the years you are just doing the next thing and it seems nothing is happening, something is happening? Trust me. You are shaping your history step by step. Learn to choose well.

During these summers I went to the Nazarene Church on 13th st in Washington DC. It was that summer I met the girl who was to be my wife. She was living in Virginia, I was in Maryland. Both families drove in to the DC church and on Wednesday nights everybody ate together before service. Eventually we started dating and I figured it was pretty safe because she was actually from Colorado and I had never been west of the Mississippi! At the end of the summer Debbie went off to school in Kansas and I went back to Boston. But this cute girl had captured my heart. During January I ended up in in Pueblo, Colorado over Christmas and we got engaged. I then got her to Maine to meet my folks. Mind you it was in the winter and there were places in Caribou where the snow was half way up the telephone pole! She still said yes. I love a lady with courage. Where are your choices leading you? I love a good adventure. What and whom do you love?

The next summer I lived in Colorado Springs and worked in construction. We got married at the end of the summer and went to Boston to finish school. We pastored a small "opportunity" in No. Attleboro, Mass for the last 5 months of school and then went off to seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. Finishing grad school in two and a half years we then moved to Upstate NY and arrived on January 1 following a lake effect storm. We pastored three churches on one district for almost 42 years, and 33 of them in the same church. During this time we had two daughters who also went to Eastern Nazarene College. Through this connection they met the men they married, who were Mainers! So for many years we visited back and forth from the Syracuse area in Upstate NY to the coast of southern and central Maine. Eventually most of the family on my side moved out of Maine but my girls led the migration back home. And always this area of Maine felt like coming home. So now here we are! The cycle from Maine back to Maine has been completed. Have you a sense of completion in the design of your life?  Let me mention three other anchors that shape the security of developing the unknown.

The first was Colossians 2:20 as a paraphrase. "For what is life? To me it is Christ." The second is a paraphrase from Proverbs. It guided the development of trust needed to be a young pastor. "Step by step as thou goest the way shall be opened before thee."The third spoke to me of the source of a living model I would need to love people. "Grace down to me and out through me." The fourth taught me how to wait patiently upon the Lord. "God is always at work doing more underneath than I can see on the surface."

So now in a new place and a new phase of life I depend upon these four anchors to be thrown out from the four corners of my life when the storms are raging. And they are raging right now. Move to Maine they said. See your kids and grand kids they said. Enjoy the beauty of Maine they said. Then they said stay home! And life like the restless sea changed again! The crisis began and there wasn't enough. At first it was temporary and an oddity. There were even funny things. But now its not much of that. Got any anchors?