I found the road that led me to Oswego, NY to be long, winding, and unexpected.

It is no secret that I tried many times and in many ways to get away. There was the feeling that there must be something more, that there must be someplace else. I couldn’t get away, though. Every chance and place led me back here.

The hardest decision I’ve made up until this point in my life wasn’t the decision to leave the country where I grew up. It wasn’t the decision to become a pastor. It wasn’t even the decision to marry Alissa. The hardest decision was the moment I agreed to buy our house. I knew what that meant. It meant I was making this place my home. It meant I was putting down roots and the roots might go so deep that I would never leave.

It turns out your love for a place grows after you’ve committed to it. At least for me, a great love grew out of my decision to put down roots. The place I never imagined calling home is now the place where I intend live out my days.

Home, I believe, is something you grow into and something that grows with you. You grow into new desires and responsibilities and then those desires and responsibilities expand and grow with you. In fact, they grow you. Our heart grows only if we sow it into a place. Otherwise it remains a hard seed. Always the potential to bear fruit, never the fruition of that potential.

Along any journey of a great distance you discover new things about yourself and the people you travel with. Some good and some bad. Some wonderful and some maddening. Some you never thought possible and some you have to learn to put up with. You watch a person grow, not over time, but through experience—the experience of joy and sorrow, victory and defeat, courage and fear, hope and doubt.

The greatest lesson one can learn on the long, winding, and unexpected road home is that time is not God’s priority. Completion is. God’s completion of us and of his purposes.

C.S. Lewis once said that duty prepares the way for delight. Duty digs the trenches where the water can flow. For the one who makes it their duty to walk the path God has laid out for them, there flows a delight beyond all that they can ask or imagine. Their priority changes from “How long” to “Lead me in Your everlasting ways”.