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Homeleaving and Homecoming

June 14, 2012 by Sybil Macbeth Leave a Comment

After two days of driving south on the highways of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, Andy and I arrived at our Memphis house at 2 PM Monday afternoon in our dirty, red Toyota and a 26-foot Budget rental truck. (It had been nineteen months since we had pulled away from the house in a similar rig heading north).  At 6PM fourteen friends arrived and unloaded the entire truck in an hour and a half. Two friends in the group cleared a space in the box-laden kitchen and spread a feast of homemade barbecue and baked beans.Two other friends marched up the front steps with a five-foot Welcome Home banner and sang There Shall Be Showers of Blessings. It was a glorious homecoming welcome–an example of  the incomparable hospitality of the South.

But wait! Last Saturday as we packed up to leave Grosse Pointe, MI, fourteen friends showed up at the parsonage/rectory to help load the moving van. That evening a couple hosted a fettuccine alfredo dinner for all of the people who had risked back injury to drag our boxes and furniture onto the truck. The next morning after Sunday services, the Christ Church congregation hosted a reception for us. They gave us a beautiful cross tile from Pewabic Pottery (a Detroit institution). Parishioners stood in line to write in a remembrance book for us. It was a glorious homeleaving–an example of the incomparable hospitality of the North.

I guess hospitality is not the exclusive property of one region of the country. “Practice hospitality ungrudgingly to one another,” says the writer of 1Peter 4:9. I have a mental picture of our Northern and Southern friends tramping up and down the truck ramp with arms full of MacBeth stuff. They expedited a tedious job with ungrudging, even playful hospitality.

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Filed Under: Praying in Color Tagged With: 1Peter 4:9, Budget Rental, moving, Pewabic Pottery, There Shall be Showers of Blessings

Moving

November 5, 2010 by Sybil Macbeth 5 Comments Leave a Comment

In about two weeks, my husband and I will move to the Detroit area for about a year for an interim ministry position. Not quite ready to give up the people and things I love in Memphis, I’m thinking of this as an extended “field trip,” a chance to study the various kinds of snow and the flora and fauna of the Great Lakes region.

With all moves, I worry about really important things like: “Is there a TJ Maxx or a Trader Joe’s?” “Will I find a dentist I like?” And the number one priority: “Who will do my hair?” Somehow I don’t think these questions fit in the WWJD category.

When I think of what Jesus would do in this situation, I remember what my friend Page in Ohio said to me many years ago. “When I move to a new place, I always pray for a friend who is older than I am–someone who is wiser and a little further along the journey of life.”  Page was that person for me. Now every time I move, I pray for an older friend. Everywhere I have lived God has answered the prayer–sometimes twofold or threefold.  “Friends come and friends go, but a true friend sticks by you like family.” (Proverbs 18:24, The Message) From Maine to Florida to the Mississippi River, these friends have stuck by me.

Michael W. Smith’s song called Friends sums it up for me.

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Filed Under: Praying in Color Tagged With: friends, moving, Proverbs 18:24

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