There is a kind of weariness that only comes from long roads taken for the sake of hope.
Rebekah and I, along with our two oldest girls—Aviva and Connie—began yesterday at 4:15 A.M. We needed to be on the road by 5:00. We loaded into Gabe’s Expedition—Gabe and Judah and Didi with us—and headed south for a season of ministry and renewal in Chihuahua, Mexico.
The drive carried us through West Texas as the last traces of recent snow slowly disappeared. As the sun rose, it revealed layered vistas of undulating hills—desert country marked by mesquite and scrub, junipers, and small, resilient live oaks. It is a landscape that teaches you how to slow down and appreciate beauty even in such austerity.
This is my third trip to Chihuahua, and I arrived filled with anticipation. For teaching in the Word. For shared faith. For the felt, unmistakable grace of the Holy Spirit at work among God’s people.
Brother Dan and Sister Amanda, Helen and Isaac, the Tindells and the Alexanders, have already been laboring here for several weeks with a young and growing congregation. Dan asked me to join them for the final weekend. I felt fortunate to arrive at what we call an ending—knowing full well that in God’s economy, endings almost always reveal themselves to be beginnings.
We are staying again with Benny and Erna. We arrived at their home around 8:00 P.M., stepping out of the vehicle with that familiar dizziness that follows fourteen hours on the road. Before we fully found our footing, the aroma of grilled chicken, beef, and pineapple drifted across the yard to meet us.
The house church here is still in its early days, but the fruit is already visible. Renewed marriages. The grace of hospitality. Bright faces marked by joy and affection. And all the quieter, harder-to-name graces that accompany a people learning to walk together with God.
It never ceases to amaze me how quickly you can feel at home—no matter how far you’ve traveled—when you arrive among brothers and sisters who love the same Lord.
We gathered on Benny’s outdoor patio around half a dozen round tables. Young people. Adults. Friends and strangers. All of us brothers and sisters. We shared meats and salsas, rice and beans, tortillas and laughter. Stories were told. Lives were more tightly knit together.
I sat across from Benny and Erna and listened as Benny told me his story—how he came to know our congregation and the road that led him to this season of helping shepherd and evangelize this new work.
Benny is instantly believable. There is no pretension in him—only a direct honesty. Erna matches him in every way. Their eyes hold yours. Their faces are open, turned toward the light like sunflowers.
Both were raised in the large Mennonite community in this region of Mexico—around fifty thousand strong—an alternative society carved out over more than a century. But Benny did not find the faith of Scripture within the rigidity of its religious forms. As an adult, he carried the ethnic and historical identity of Mennonite while living within the evangelical stream of Christianity.
For thirteen years, he served on the ministry team of one of the largest evangelical churches in the valley.
With tears welling in his eyes, Benny told us about a moment in 2007. He attended an informal church gathering and heard a young man singing. He leaned over and said to the person next to him, “That man has something. I want to know him.”
That singer became Benny’s closest friend—and the pastor of the church where Benny would serve. Until that pastor’s life was tragically cut short at the age of 33.
The loss shook everything.
“Our marriage was pulling apart,” Benny said. “We had given ourselves completely to the church. And suddenly everything felt lifeless. Purposeless.”
He went to leadership and told them he had to step away—not partially, but completely. What followed was pain and isolation—and a crushing revelation. The friendships they thought were strong proved fragile. There was no support network. No community. No people.
Eventually, Benny and Erna decided to travel to Canada. In the middle of COVID, they were forced into a two-week quarantine in Canada—alone together in a cabin, with nothing to do but talk and read the entire New Testament.
“I had spent my whole life in church,” Benny said. “But everything that was normal to me in church, I couldn’t find in the New Testament. And everything I found in the New Testament—I had never experienced.”
“It was the best thing that ever happened to us,” Erna added.
While in Canada, Benny met with a close friend and poured out his confusion. Church after church felt hollow. You could smell the falsehood. Some had fragments—but nothing whole. Nothing alive.
As Benny described what he saw in Scripture—the relationships, the joy, the life in the Spirit, mutual service, love—his friend stopped him.
“You need to meet someone else,” he said and told him about another Mennonite couple eight hours farther north, in the far reaches of Alberta.
“They spent time with some church in Texas, that sounds like what you are describing.“
So Benny and Erna drove the eight hours to meet this couple.
That meeting was life-changing.
As Benny again explained his discoveries from Scripture, the man listening grew still and said, “You are describing a place I’ve been.” He told them about an unplanned stop in Central Texas—RV trouble that turned into a two-week stay at Homestead Heritage in Waco. He described the people, the life, the community.
Benny and Erna were profoundly hopeful and a bit skeptical of at least one thing: the clothing. It reminded them too much of the rule-based religion of their upbringing. But too much else aligned with Scripture to dismiss.
The problem was distance. Canada to Texas was simply too far.
Then Benny noticed something else. There was a community in Idaho—directly on the route they were already scheduled to travel.
They passed through Deary in early 2023 and nearly drove on. But one restaurant looked promising. They made a U-turn and pulled into the Pie Safe Café.
“As soon as we walked through the door,” Benny said, “I knew. I turned to Erna and said, ‘These are the people.’”
What began as breakfast turned into three hours. Brian and John showed them around—homesteads, gardens, families living near one another. Brian welcomed them into his home, unguarded and open. Every room. Even the children’s rooms.
Benny laughed as he recalled seeing a photograph of Brian’s wife, Rebeccah, standing beside President Bush and briefly wondering if these people were somehow “connected.” The explanation was much more ordinary: Rebeccah had worked as a housekeeper in the President’s home.
Benny admitted that his only fear was that Erna would be put off by the conservative dress. But when they left, Erna told him, “If I can have a life like this, I’ll change the way I dress without hesitation.”
Tears filled their eyes as they relived the moment—the discovery of a hope they had feared no longer existed.
“We never looked back,” Benny said. “We knew we had come home.”
That word—home—landed heavily in our hearts around the table.
Home is not geography. It is not shared style or custom. Home is the peace the soul finds among kindred spirits. A refuge where the heart can trust again. Dream again. Love again.
That same sense of home met us here in the Chihuahuan desert after a long day on the road. And it is the thing so many across the world are aching for—a rest that cannot be found apart from Jesus and cannot be found alone. A house made of living stones, fitted together to host the presence of God.
Benny told us how Brian later called and said he sensed the same connection—and invited them to a conference in Waco. “Those eight days in Texas,” Benny said, “were a pivot point in our lives.”
And again, “We’ve never looked back.”
As I listened, I thought, Lord, what a treasure it is when those seeking their brothers finally find them.
We’ve only known Benny and Erna for two and a half years. But already, it feels like home for us, too.
Pray with us that God would raise an expression of His house here—a home for searching hearts in this place. A people unwilling to waste time on human programs, but eager to find a family of faithfulness and friendship. A house not made of wood or steel, but of living stones—part of the fortress Jesus is building, against which the gates of hell will not prevail.
I sometimes worry that telling stories like this may sound boastful. But we are not the answer.
Jesus is the answer.
We are not the church—but we are determined to be an expression of it. We are learning as we go. And when we find hope—anchored love, restoration, joy—we must tell it.
Because it is not our house.
It is our Father’s house.
And He deserves the glory.
And others deserve to know that He is still working miracles in our day—miracles that make a home, even here, in the Chihuahuan desert.
And it strikes me, as I sit here, that some of the greatest pivots and graces a life will ever know are hidden inside heartbreak—inside the loss of a friend, the sudden absence of a pastor, the sad dissolution of a ministry dream. Miracles of hope arrive disguised amidst disorientation and anguish: COVID quarantines in the far northern reaches of Canada, discouragement after discouragement in the search for something real, long roads taken with no clear destination. And yet, somehow, those same wounds become doorways—leading to a small, half-revived ghost town in Idaho, to a table where strangers become brothers, to a dream rekindled and carried back across borders into Mexico. What looked like endings reveal themselves as beginnings, and what felt like exile becomes the road back home. The Father is still gathering His children, still forming a people among whom every heart finds a home around His table.