I remembered Thomas Wolfe’s often quoted line, “You can’t go home again,” last weekend when we traveled to Tupelo to check on our grandson, Thomas, who was in the Northeast Mississippi Medical Center.  Thomas is home now and doing well.  Funny thing is, I was born in the same hospital. So was our son Chris.  It’s a familiar place, yet it has changed. Another construction project is underway and the face of that healing place is changing.

While we were in Tupelo we drove by First Church where I had been pastor from 2000-2006.  The trees we had planted on the church grounds were now towering. Yet the parsonage looked much the same.  It was the same but different.

A few years ago, I returned to First United Methodist Church, Gainesville, Georgia, where I served as Minister with Youth during my seminary experience.  We visited Richard and Donna Shaw who took us under their wings and became our Georgia family when we were younger than my children are now.

Gainesville, First, was the church  of a seminarians dream.  It was where my real education took place—not in the class room at Emory, but in the sanctuary and fellowship hall and youth room.  It was where I learned most of what I know about ministry from  Jim Thompson, who was senior minister, mentor, friend.  It is against Gainesville, First that I measure myself.

This summer, while on sabbatical, Lynn and I went back to Gainesville for a brief visit. It was, in a way, going home.   Not to the home of our roots but to the first home we shared as a married couple.  We drove by our little apartment on Thompson Bridge Road and then the house we rented on Bradford Street.  There are some things that over time change little.

We saw Ralph and Randy, the Brooks brothers who were solid members of the youth group.  Both are thirty something.  We saw Margaret Ellen who teaches English in Mexico City and Jane and Angie and Marsha.  We saw their parents  all who were the main supporters  of the youth program and of us.

Looking back, the carpet in the sanctuary, installed 24 years ago when the new sanctuary was built,  is fading a bit.  Ralph and Randy are thinning on top and their parents, Ralph, Sr. and Rose, are retired now.  So maybe some things have changed.  What hasn’t changed is the depth of meaning of those heartfelt relationships.

Maybe if Gainesville is one of those places I call  home, you can go home again.  Not home in the sense of things being as they were, but home to a sense of place and purpose and   relationship; home to a deeper part of your best self.

We did not have time to tell all that has happened to them or us since these last 30 years.  Maybe we will soon. If we do, I suspect what we will discover is that in the telling of our stories, we will begin to sense a deeper abiding Presence whose hand has guided, formed and informed our journeys.  I’m grateful our journey took us there.  I remembered some things I didn’t know I’d forgotten.  Namely, that in spite of distance over time and space, some things remains true.

In a way, when we gather for worship, it is a kind of homecoming–a coming home to the place where God meets us,a coming home to that sense of belonging,  a coming home where we are loved in spite of have far we’ve moved away.

I  hope you will come home this Sunday in whatever way you need to come.