A Home Base

Last month we posted a blog that had some fun with this question of why we feel we need a house.  Lest anyone think we’re not taking their questions seriously, we thought we should post a more serious answer to the question.

We need a home base.  That home base could be on wheels, but we came to the conclusion that a motorhome would cost us more in the long run and would have to be replaced more quickly so a house made more sense.  Even though we will be gone a lot, we need a place to regroup and get ready for the next trip.

Today's "office" will need to disappear before the next meal.

We need a place to set up an office.  People have been very gracious along the way to let us use their dining room table or their guest room so that we have a place to work when we are in their homes.  However, all of our books and files are in storage boxes.  We do not feel it’s wise to go buy that book we feel we need when we know it’s somewhere in a box in Maine.  That means every time we go to write up a lesson to teach in a Bible institute or church, we’re starting over from scratch and we don’t have any of our reference books to help us.  It also means that when we are in the middle of a project, we don’t have a convenient place to keep it.  Every lesson and sermon outline needs to stay with us.  The longer we’re in this ministry, the thicker our current working files are becoming.

We need a quiet place to work.  During these years of being “homeless,” we have used libraries, restaurants, picnic tables, living room couches, beds, the car, and dining room tables as our “office.”  That means that usually there are lots of distractions around us.  Sometimes those distractions can be easily ignored and we keep working.  At other times, those distractions end up involving us, breaking the flow of thought and making it harder to get back to work when the distraction is over.  I have been asked to write curriculum for IPM, but I’ve found it very difficult to do it with the lifestyle we currently have. 

We need a place to keep things.  Over the last two years, we have often found ourselves looking for things we thought we had brought along with us.  When we can’t find it, we then ask ourselves where it might be.  Did we leave it in Georgia at my parents or in Maine at the storage locker?  Or did we lose it and we need to buy a new one?  It will be nice to have a place to keep things where we can go to the shelf or the closet where it’s supposed to be and actually find it. 

Everyone we know who has our type of ministry has a home base.  While there may be a better way of doing this ministry, we have not yet run into a better model than one that involves having a home base.  One day that home base may be abroad, but air travel originating in other countries is generally more expensive than travel originating here.  So for right now it made sense to us to make a house in the USA our home base.

Any questions we haven't answered?  Feel free to post your comments below, and we'll respond to them.