Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam...

Invariably, when I meet someone new, there are the usual questions asked of me about my move to England. They all ask me how long am I visiting here for. When I explain that I now live here, without fail, I get the amazed look along with, "why on earth would you want to move here?" This one always amuses me. People over here in England think that it's so much better in America than it is here. Well, yes and no. It is better in many ways, back in America, but in other ways, it's pretty nice here. Then they will ask me if I ever get homesick. The short answer to this is, yes I do! Sometimes I get very homesick and at the strangest of times too. Just yesterday, while sitting in church, I got to missing my home church back in Adairsville, Georgia, and my church family. So, what do I miss the most about my life back home in the United States?

Naturally, I miss my family a great deal! I miss my mother and my two sisters. I miss going out to my sister Nancy's home and seeing all the farm animals she and my brother-in-law, Joe, have. They usually have several goats and sheep; here lately, they also have a donkey or two in the pasture right behind their home. I miss seeing whatever is Joe's latest project. One time, he bought a small tractor with a back-hoe (that's a digger for all you Brits reading this) similar to the one above, so that he could dig trenches to plant loads of tomato plants so that he could sell tomatos. More recently, he and Nancy bought a motor home very much like the one to the left, and a boat so that they could go camping down at Lake Allatoona on weekends. He has rigged up solar panels and a wind-driven generator to charge all the batteries for all his "toys." He's always into something and it's always facinating to see what's new. It's always nice to sit on their back poarch and look out across the valley from their hilltop perspective.

I miss spending time with my mother! She and I are very close and the 4000 mile separation is hard to bear. As she is now 80 and her eye sight is failing. She suffers from Macular Degeneration and she is not able to read like she used to. My mother taught me how to read when I was four and five years old and she instilled in me her passion for reading. Because of this and because she has relied on me for so much ever since my father died more than twenty years ago, I miss spending time with her!

As I mentioned above, I miss my church family. Thirty years ago, my family and I joined the Adairsville First United Methodist Church and I have been a member there for most of those thirty years. For a few years, I was a member of another United Methodist church because I was more involved there than I was at Adairsville UMC, but after a while, I felt the call to move back to my home church. Most of my oldest friends are part of my church family; that is to say, they have been my friends longer than any others. Many of them I have known for all of those thirty years. Others have joined over the years and became good and dear friends. In the past few years, before I moved to England, I became involved with the Senior Saints and their Wednesday morning Bible study group. Since this group didn't adhere to a particular program, they set their own agenda and move along at their own pace. Because of this, the discussions are often meaty and thought provoking! I miss the Wednesday morning Bible study group because I learned so much and I came to love and trust this group of people as my own family!

Twelve years ago, I went on the Walk to Emmaus, a three day non-denominational program designed to develop leadership within church congregations. The Walk to Emmaus, for those of you who have never heard of it, is not a physical walk, but a spiritual walk; a mini-course in Christianity, if you will, that is based upon the model that Jesus used when He taught the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24). The Walk to Emmaus organization is centered around regional "communities" which hold the Walks on a regular basis. The Mountain Top Walk to Emmaus Community is the particular community that I am a part of. These people, from all walks of life, from various denominations and churches, are a very dedicated group of people spread from Asheville, North Carolina to Bartow County, Georgia. Since my Walk to Emmaus, I have become very much involved in the Mountain Top community and have many dear friends scattered all over the North Georgia/Western North Carolina region. I miss these folks very much and I miss being involved in the five or six Walks they hold every year. It has been my privilege to be a part of four different Walk teams. And I have lost count of the many Walks I have worked either in the kitchen, the dining room as a servant or in the prayer chapel as a prayer warrior. I have walked many a spiritual mile with these awesome people and they are my Emmaus family. I so look forward to the day when I can rejoin them in ministry!

And this brings me to what else I miss most dearly: the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. I cannot tell you how many days of my life I have spent wandering and exploring as many different roads in these mountains. I must have driven a hundred thousand miles over the years trying to find new places and revisiting all the old places I love so much. I have seen some pretty awesome scenery all over the United States. Of these places, like the Grand Canyon, or the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, none surpass the beauty and majesty of the Blue Ridge Mountains, especially during the Fall! I miss driving through the communities, villages and towns of these mountains. Places like Tellico Plains, Tennessee; Andrews and Franklin, North Carolina; or Blairsville, Hiawassee and Young Harris, Georgia seem to be calling out to me, begging me to return home, my spiritual home. It was in these mountains where my family, as I was growing up, met and overcame one of our biggest challenges: our unity during a crisis where my father had open heart surgery in Asheville, North Carolina at a time when open heart surgery was still quite novel. It was here in these mountains, on a hill overlooking Lake Chatuge, that I went on my Walk to Emmaus and my Christian faith took on new and vibrant dimensions. It is in these mountains that I feel most alive and closest to God!

There are other things I miss, like the sound and feel of power from a good V-8 engine. In a land where a 2 liter engine is considered to be big, the opportunity to enjoy driving a V-8 equipped vehicle are far and few between. I miss going down to watch the Rome Braves play baseball. I miss going out to eat with my family and friends back home. But all of these are trivial to the big things I listed above. It is the things like my families and the mountains that I miss the most. However, in spite of missing all of these things, I would still give them up if it meant having to choose them over my wife, Rebecca, and my step-daughter, Emily. They are my greatest treasures here on earth!