Monday, May 17^th 2021
To Members and Friends of
First Presbyterian Church, Champaign
 
Dear Friends,
 
            Our youngest graduated college two weeks ago, and me and Rachel and our other two sons gathered to celebrate. We all took a brief trip to Litchfield Beach afterwards and spent a week in a condo overlooking the ocean, cooking, walking on the beach hunting shells, and exploring the Brookgreen Gardens where I delighted in petting a friendly goat and watching an alligator sunbathe. We fit in a game of putt-putt and a few games of Scrabble, walked a labyrinth and miles of beach, and generally chatted, relaxed, read, and slept in.
 
            While we enjoyed one another, our hearts were heavy because every transition brings a certain amount of gravitas. John Mark said goodbye to some really good friends at school. One begins a job in Pittsburgh. Another accepted a fellowship in South Africa. Like runners in a race, they stretched young bodies, stepped to the start line, and awaited the gun to signal the start. But no one sprinted away from that line when the gun sounded. They hung back for a few last conversations. 
 
            And we all remembered Jeremy Chen. He graduated Riverside High School a year behind our Joseph and a year ahead of our Benjamin. All my boys knew and liked Jeremy. He was whip-smart, all-state clarinet, drum-major of the band, all-around nice guy, beloved by teachers and students alike. Jeremy got colon cancer last year in a California grad school, and died last week, a short year later. A friend, Hope, flew out to California to see him and reported that just three days before he died, he could still crack up a room. God bless him and all his grieving family and friends.
 
            Transitions are bittersweet. The old life slips away. The new life begins. Just like that. It’s really wonderful. And sometimes a little scary. And sometimes you’ve worked so hard, and run so long, you just aren’t ready for the next leg of the journey. But ready or not, it’s time. It’s time to leave this home for a new one. We are made for the journey. In John Mark’s case, it will be to Baltimore. He’ll spend two years with Teach for America there, and maybe some grad work at Johns Hopkins.* Jeremy heads for a more distant shore—even as our hearts are full, carrying his heart, as we do, in ours. 
 
            Emily Dickinson so grieved the death of her parents that she wrote, “Home is so far from Home.”
            
            Know the feeling?
 
            Rachel and I drove 889.5 miles on Friday. It was a long day behind the wheel. Traffic was light. Many gas stations were out of gas, but we found the ones that were able to fill our tank. We wanted to get home because, well, it was time. We made the drive in one marathon day because we wanted to wake up in our own bed, and get to the Saturday Farmer’s Market and bump into fresh vegetables and old friends. 
 
            Emil Cobb, The Button Guy at the market, made us a refrigerator magnet of a picture of our boys and us sitting on a sunny, windswept deck at Murrell’s Inlet waiting for an early dinner. We were all smiles on that sunny day. And Rachel and I smiled as we watched Emil make our magnets as we waited. He serviced the soda machines at the University before he retired. We’ve been stopping by his booth for four years, every Saturday. He’s like family, as is Phil Strang in the booth on the same row; his new painting is of a rabbit. It’s hard for Rachel to like rabbits; they eat all the leaves off her flowers and tomatoes, but they’re part of the family, too.
 
            Home includes these rabbits and Phil and Emil and you. Sometimes home is so far from home. 
 
            And sometimes home’s boundaries are so far flung it’s impossible ever to leave, no matter how far the journey takes you. 
 
            Thanks for sharing the journey with us.
 
Much love to you all.
 
Matt Matthews
 
 
* (Johns Hopkins’ brother (?), Ferdinand, sent money to the woman in Arkansas he read about in the Presbyterian Outlook who were picking cotton in order to raise funds to build a new sanctuary for the Presbyterian church in 1913. That was my first call out of seminary!)