Real Families: Meditations on family life
We’ve recently moved to a new house and neighborhood. On our first Sunday, the church we visited hosted a reception for a member who was turning 99. We learned that this remarkable woman was still living in the same house where she had grown up as an only child and where she and her husband had raised nine of their own children. Several people, one after the other, told us this astonishing news, to which I could only stammer in wide-eyed disbelief, You can’t be serious.
My imagination doesn’t serve me well when trying to fathom what it would be like to live one’s entire life in the same house, on the same block, in the same town, for 99 years. My best calculation is that I’ve lived in at least 23 houses over my five-plus decades, and that doesn’t include many dorm rooms from first grade through college and short-term living arrangements during transitional times. Five of those were childhood homes in Ethiopia, and several more included homes on furlough visits to America.
My mother used to say, “It takes a heap o’ livin’ to make a house a home.” Gladness glows from fingertips to toes as I remember the many houses that became vessels for heaps of good livin’.”
Here’s a sample: The home of my birth was a rough brick factory-worker duplex on a cotton-mill compound turned missionary hospital in Nazareth, Ethiopia. The cinder block house a few years later was on the Bible Academy compound along the gravel road leading toward the cane fields and sugar factories of Wonji and Shoa. From my bedroom window, I could see a cluster of thatched huts just across the fence and the sacred grove where sacrifices were made. We used army cots for couches, a wringer washer would flatten little hands along with the wet clothes if you weren’t careful, and we used wood-heated water for bathing once a week.
In one furlough, we lived in a Pennsylvania farmhouse with hay mow tunnels in the pungent tobacco barn, an apple cellar, a parlor with plush furniture and a warm kitchen where I told my family while staring at a bowl of golden home-canned peaches that I had decided to follow Jesus.
A squat bungalow housed up to 10 of us at one time and many more when the family flocked home on holidays. My husband and I were married under the spreading elm tree there within sight of a vineyard, fruit trees and garden that Dad still cultivates at 92.
A “bachelor’s” apartment in California with a bed that folded out of the wall was our first home as a married couple. Later we moved to a rent-free apartment at Stump Mortuary, where as seminary students we earned a little by assisting with viewings and funerals. Ten of us lived in intentional community for a year in a large house a few blocks from Sirhan Sirhan’s former residence.
In our sublet first apartment in the former Yugoslavia, Gerald and I shared a single bed—for six months. Next we moved to an apartment in Zagreb’s “little red square,” where my night nursings of our firstborn included putting wood on the fire in the ceramic stove. When we invited a Hungarian student to share our space, we divided the living room with large wardrobes so half of it could be her bedroom. Our landlady yelled at us: “What will the neighbors think?” but reluctantly came around.
Later, with our year-old son in tow, we lived in a Muslim neighborhood of Sarajevo, Bosnia. Each evening we loved to go upstairs to share Turkish coffee and TV news with our landlord’s family. Again we invited a young student at the university who had nowhere to live into our little apartment. She slept on the couch bed in the kitchen and helped out with child care.
Our next basement apartment was dark and laced with mildew. I nearly despaired when we arrived back in Zagreb from the United States with our 3-week-old second son to find the landlord excavating the bathroom. But it was here that I first truly owned my vocation as a mother, and my first book was born.
There was the student apartment a block from Lake Michigan during graduate study and the shared life of Reba Place Church. When we returned to Zagreb, we shared a household with Serbian friends. This is where we first brought our 3-week-old daughter home. In recent years, we’ve enjoyed owning our own homes in Virginia, one on a hill where my dad used to chase rabbits as a boy. And now we have a home filled with light on the Elkhart River.
What is this place? Whether one house or many, small or spacious, dark or filled with light—”One thing I ask of the Lord … that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.”
Sara Wenger Shenk is president of Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Ind.
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