As Rebekah and I prepare to leave tomorrow for a short ministry trip to Europe, my mind drifts—as it often does before crossing an ocean—to the peculiar gift of being a stranger.
Travel has always sharpened my love for home. For all of America’s fractures and failings, it remains the only place I would choose to live. There is something here—older than 250 years, reaching back to the Pilgrims—that runs deeper than policy. A frontier instinct. A willingness to leave the suffocating certainty of managed existence and take one’s chances in the wilderness. That spirit may be thinning, but it is still here.
And yet, abroad, one learns what it means to be linguistically alone.
You can sit in a crowded market in Central Africa, a mountain village in South America, or a midnight airport terminal in Asia, and hear a thousand conversations flowing around you—urgent, animated, full of meaning—and be entirely outside of them. After a while, language becomes sound. Sound becomes background. Your world narrows to gestures and expressions. You begin to read shoulders, eyes, posture. You learn to live without comprehension.
Until, suddenly, something breaks through.
Your mother tongue.
I remember it distinctly—1:30 A.M. in Dubai. I was seated across from a family dressed in traditional Arab attire. An eight-year-old boy kept staring at me. I winked. He flashed a wide, toothy grin.
“Where are you going?” I asked slowly.
“Dallas,” he replied in broken English.
“So am I,” I said, gesturing southward in the air.
His mother leaned forward. “You . . . live Dallas?”
“Just south,” I answered carefully.
Then, from one row back, a woman’s voice pierced the terminal hum.
“Near Waco?”
And the world rearranged.
“Yes,” I said, slipping back into relaxed Texas cadence.
Heads turned. They were a mission team. One taught music and had worked with Baylor. I mentioned I lived north of Waco, in the community of Homestead Heritage.
Her eyes lit up.
“The quesadilla burger!”
Another voice added, “And the jalapeño sweet potato soup!”
Now we were truly friends. I confessed that the quesadilla burger was my recipe. We laughed as if we’d known one another for years. In the middle of the Persian Gulf, surrounded by a language not our own, we had found shared memory—place, flavor, familiarity. For a moment, I felt home.
I have often thought: this is how Christians are meant to recognize one another in the modern world—strangers in a strange land who hear, beneath the noise, a familiar tongue.
This week, that same chord was struck much closer to home.
We try to furnish our house with pieces that tell stories. If they are affordable and well made, we will gladly rescue them from Facebook Marketplace rather than assemble something flat-packed from a warehouse. So when Rebekah found a modest antique chair in Woodway for $100, she borrowed my mother’s minivan and took Aaron (9) and Ella (4) to retrieve it.
That evening, around a table heavy with beef stew, mashed potatoes, garden carrots, and fresh bread, she told the story.
The sellers were an elderly couple—gentle, unhurried, kind. They welcomed the children inside as if expecting company. The chair, they explained, had been lightly used—mostly to hold a quilt.
But it was never about the chair.
Rebekah said it was one of those homes where generations line the walls. Not cluttered, but storied. Every object seemed anchored in memory.
Before they mentioned the chair, they showed a violin—perfectly preserved—given to his mother as a wedding gift. It hung as a quiet bridge between eras. Then a delicate lace doily, woven not from thick yarn but fine natural thread.
“This,” she said, “is what my mother and father’s wedding cake sat on.” A wedding from 100 years past.
It was not a display of possessions. It was an offering of continuity.
Aaron interrupted the dinner narration.
“When I went into the living room,” he said, “there were animal heads everywhere. And a big turkey. So I asked about it.”
The 85-year-old gentleman husband was a hunter. He had lost sight in one eye and shot from the left. When doctors recommended a defibrillator after a heart attack, he asked them to wait until after hunting season—or at least to install it on the right side so he would not miss a trip to his son-in-law’s land. The physician accommodated him.
Aaron described a fog-covered field and a buck stepping out—dropped clean with one shot.
Then came the question that unlocked everything.
“Does your mommy preserve food?” Mrs. Myrtle asked.
Aaron didn’t know what that meant.
“When she said canning,” he told us, “I said yes.”
At that, the couple brightened. “Wayne, Myrtle—let’s take them back and show them the canned goods.”
They led Rebekah and the children into their bedroom. The closet, they explained, was the best place—dark and cool. They sat on the edge of the bed discussing vinegar, spring water, and the chemistry of crunch. She insisted they take jars home: salsa, pickles, her special recipe.
By the time Rebekah finished telling the story, the dill pickles were gone. I am not easily impressed by homemade pickles. These were, without exaggeration, the crunchiest I have ever eaten.
Later, Mrs. Myrtle called to explain the exact vinegar—only sold in one store in West—and the importance of spring water over treated municipal supplies.
They spoke of music, too. He, from a Methodist background, loving lively gospel tunes. She, a German Lutheran, who almost wasn’t allowed to court him because of denominational lines. They laughed at the memory. Rebekah showed them a video of our girls singing “There Is a Fountain.” Mrs. Myrtle made her promise to bring them back so they could sing together in their living room.
As Rebekah described it, I pictured my wife and two youngest children sitting on the edge of that bed, in a house thick with memory, speaking a language that is slowly disappearing from public life—canning, hymn-singing, hunting, well-built furniture, handed-down instruments.
And I thought: they must have felt what I felt in Dubai.
Surrounded by a world that does not speak your values—screens, speed, politics, noise—then suddenly, out of the cacophony, someone speaks your tongue. A young mother. Two children. A shared love of preservation, music, craft. Instantly, you are not alone.
“Did you buy the chair?” I asked when the story ended.
“Oh, my,” Rebekah laughed. “I did. But I forgot about it. It’s still in the car.”
In a way, that was the whole point.
It was never about the chair.
The objects we build, preserve, pass down—recipes, doilies, violins, pickles, furniture—are not ends in themselves. They are canvases. The real painting is connection. Friendship across generations. Continuity between past and present. The reassurance that what mattered still matters.
Sometimes you find that reassurance at 1:30 A.M. in a foreign airport.
Sometimes you find it twenty minutes away in Woodway.
In either case, it feels like coming home.