Finding Home Away from Home

“Not much of my life makes any sense outside of God.”  Fr. Greg Boyle, S.J.

There are three moments in my life of which I can distinctively point to and say, “God did that.”

Celebrating my transfer into the UMC with
my friend,colleague, and fellow clergy
 Laura Markle Downton

The first was my adoption as an infant in Seoul, South Korea. After my birth mother left me in a hospital, I spent three months in foster care before a couple in Oklahoma City welcomed me into their home. God provided me with the family I needed even though they were on the other side of the world.

The second moment was my acceptance into Duke Divinity School. The richness of the theological imagination I developed there coupled with the meaningful connections and relationships I built in Durham have sustained my ministry thus far and shaped me in ways I am still working to understand.

The third moment occurred last Thursday at a church in Towson, MD where I was transferred into the Baltimore Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church as a full elder. After 31 years of being first a member and then an ordained minister in the Wesleyan Church, I said goodbye to a place I have long called home and entered into a new family and a future shaped by the loving hand of Christ.

It is not an easy task to leave a church that has raised you and formed some of the most intimate parts of your life. The Wesleyan Church helped me first perceive of the triune God and introduced me to countless women and men into my life who would serve as mentors, confidants, and friends. My undergraduate education was at a Wesleyan institution of higher education and over the years I have attended more Wesleyan conferences, summer camps, and youth conventions than can be recalled. If I have ever ministered, served, or cared for others with any note of distinction it is because I was raised and reared in a church that instilled within me a deep love for Jesus and the desire to exude holiness in my every day existence.

Now I find myself in a new denomination that feels strangely familiar and yet noticeably different. The attentiveness to John Wesley’s theological framework remains, and in some ways presents itself in even more ways than what I am used to experiencing. We read many of the same books, study similar theologians, and sing songs already drilled into my consciousness.

Yes, there are differences and those differences made the case for why I feel more at home being a United Methodist than a Wesleyan. But even as I settle into my new digs and begin getting used to having a bishop to report to, I’m reminded of a passage from Paul Ellie’s The Life You Save May be Your Own in which he recalls an interaction between Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. Ellie writes,

“He (Merton) asked for her (Day) prayers and for those of the poor. She assured him that he had them. ‘Every night,’ she told him, ‘we say the rosary and compline in our little chapel over the barn, heavy with the smell of cow downstairs, and we have a bulletin board there with the names of those who ask our prayers. Yours is there.”

Over the years, I have asked countless people in the Wesleyan Church to pray for me. I am convinced that I am where I am today because these faithful individuals lovingly placed my name on the bulletin board of their hearts and remembered my request during their faithful deliberations with God.

Like Fr. Boyle, my life makes little sense outside of God and in some significant way, is similarly incoherent without the Wesleyan Church. For this I give thanks to God.  Amen.