Tuesday, November 4, 2025
Memorial of Saint Charles Borromeo, Bishop
           (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
 Story of a house
We thought we had lost our house. The house offered us in 1989 as new campus ministers in Urbana by former pastors of New Covenant Fellowship who were moving on to higher education and thoughtful protest over the next several years. Marty and his wife had done so much work on their house on Lincoln Ave.
In their footsteps we did much more work over the next thirty-five years: concrete driveway, a new backyard shed to add to the play structure and shed already there, an upstairs remodel which includes an amazing cupola, double-sided skylight over a new Jacuzzi, upstairs office and bookshelves and a sewing nook overlooking Lincoln Avenue. Twenty years later after a February snowstorm melt poured in right onto a beautiful desk in our counseling waiting room, we remodeled that room and the office, along with replacing the old asbestos shingles with vinyl siding and soffits.
Soon after we moved in, friends from the campus house teamed up to replace our roof. It’s getting about time to replace it again, I guess. Always so much to do maintaining a 125-year-old house (in the upstairs insulation I found a well-preserved political calling card dated 1910), a house which was moved in 1945 from several blocks away to its present resting spot, 80 years later.
We, though many, are one Body in Christ
and individually parts of one another.
Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us,
let us exercise them.
Driving from Urbana to Austin at the end of last week, I arrived at our apartment about 7 pm on Halloween and retrieved a pile of held mail delivered that day. The mail included a certified letter from the Champaign County Collections office. We weren’t here to sign for the letter, but it was delivered anyway. The letter seemed to say that our house would be available for sale at 9 am on Oct 31 because of unpaid back taxes. The auction had been going on all day.
We had no idea we owed the taxes, or we would have paid them. We didn’t receive a late payment note, or we would have paid them then. But the deadline to pay was Thursday, Oct 30, and we missed it. We were in Urbana between October 12 and 28 and expected mail to come to the house and business we have been so proud of, but it was sent to Austin instead. We go back and forth between Illinois and Texas a few times each year, and mail does sometimes get lost. This time … that mattered. And on the weekend there was no way to find out anything.
Margaret would be flying to Austin on Saturday. On this Halloween Friday night, alone with the pile of mail, alone with this terrifying certified letter, I thought someone had probably bought our house for a song and all our belongings inside too. Our friend Thein asked us for a family photo twenty years ago and a friend in Burma created a portrait made from straw, which Thein presented to us at Christmas. All of us are smiling. It’s hung on our dining room wall ever since. Who has it now?
Serve the Lord,
rejoice in hope,
endure in affliction,
persevere in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the holy ones,
exercise hospitality.
Alone on Saturday, and then together with Margaret after I showed her the letter on Sunday evening, we kept thinking of precious parts of our material lives that we imagined were now lost. They flowed up into our consciousness like ghosts. I had twenty-four hours head start on Margaret, though, and gradually I began to let the ghosts all go. Our precious stuff mattered less and less to me. I felt freedom begin to displace grief. My hands held on less and less tightly.
This did not feel like classic denial or dissociation. It felt more like faith and trust. My prayers lost their desperation and turned more into prayer language songs. Still however, both of us still felt like throwing up, and we expected sleep to be slammed by nightmares.
Margaret worked for the census in 2010 and one of her census-takers is now the auditor in Champaign County. She sent George a note, and he responded within minutes (15 years later!). He clarified that we were subject to a “tax sale,” not a house sale, and he told us who to call the next day. Cornita in the county clerk’s office said we had three years to pay those back taxes before the house itself would give up its ghosts.
So now we’ve arranged with Marc to get the taxes paid tomorrow, and we have a house in Urbana to return to. It’s cleaner than ever according to Margaret and her friend Sherry, who worked hard all last week getting it that way. And I have to say that we appreciate our home on Lincoln Avenue more than we have ever since the first time in 1989, when we walked in the door with all those oohs and ahhs.
But at the same time, I feel less attached to the house and all the good stuff inside than I ever have before. Margaret and I are both 76 this year, and we cling to life less, now that we’ve “lived our lives.” God made us and God can have us. And God can also have his very very very fine house as well.
Always our hands are loosening so we can raise them open to heaven’s gate, toward the beckoning, toward the open arms of Jesus.
In you, O Lord, I have found my peace.
Nay rather, I have stilled and quieted
my soul like a weaned child.
Like a weaned child on its mother’s lap,
so is my soul within me.
 (Romans 12, Psalm 131, Matthew 11, Luke 14)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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