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Quotations I love: sojourners and homemakers on a journey

Lynne Baab • Thursday March 4 2021

The authors of a book on homelessness use the term “journeying homemaking” to describe the way they believe Christians are called to live in the world. The authors are Brian Walsh and Steven Bouma-Prediger, and here’s their description of how those words work together for Christians:

“So the sojourner is a homemaker, but a homemaker who is potentially on the move. And the homeland for which the sojourner yearns is not some other world, but this world redeemed and transfigured. The contrast is not ontological but escatalogical. Because the kingdom of God is not yet realized in its fullness, the sojourner yearns...

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Creative prayer: Returning prayer

Lynne Baab • Thursday June 27 2019

“Returning prayer is a way of coming back home to God and to ourselves. We leave the ‘far country’ and our false self efforts and return to who God made us to be.” [1]

I found this language of “returning prayer” in a new book on the Enneagram that I really like. The words reminded me of a statement I love from the Church of Ireland Prayer Book: “When we were far off, you met us in your son and brought us home.”

In one sense, any prayer is a returning prayer, because we draw near to God through Jesus Christ, who met...

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Four kinds of home

Lynne Baab • Wednesday January 11 2017

The notion of “home” has been a big deal in my life, a contested and difficult concept. In my childhood, we lived in 12 places in my first 15 years, a pattern that makes a child feel pretty disoriented. In 2011, I came to a place of peace about having two homes – Seattle and Dunedin – rather than having to try to figure out which one was really home.

My 2011 shift in thinking about home (which I wrote about in an earlier blog post on this blog) came from reading Thomas Tweed’s book, Dwelling and Crossing. Tweed argues that we...

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Quotations I love: Arnold Glasow on feeling at home with people

Lynne Baab • Wednesday November 9 2016

“Hospitality is making others feel at home. Some folks make you feel at home. Others make you wish you were.” – Arnold H. Glasow (1905-1998)

Arnold Glasow was a businessman and a humorist. The quotation I’ve highlighted here is both insightful and humorous—in a sad way. How tragic that all of us have people in our lives who we would just as soon spent very little time with.

One challenge raised by this quotation is how we can learn to show love to people who make us wish we were somewhere else. My answer has to do with love and limits. God’s call...

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