Your Own Backyard
by Rick Saenz

We've owned quite a few yards over the years, and none of them meant much to me—pleasant to look at, unpleasant to tend. Not so the kids. They always managed to zero in on the one particular corner that was a bit less bland and uniform than the others, and it became their domain. Trees, bushes, and rocks were transformed into houses, stores, campgrounds, and forts, at least in their imagination. Hours were spent in diligent exploration and re-exploration of every interesting irregularity. Even now they can rhapsodize in loving detail about this or that aspect of a yard that is long gone from my own memory.

Their love of the land is a natural and intuitive thing, a gift from God, one that we have managed to nurture in them mostly by not filling up their young lives with unnecessary distraction. We haven't yet provided them with land that is worthy of setting down roots, or the stability needed to set them down, but we encourage them to embrace what is at hand, and they do. As they proceed to make a new yard their own, I look on, envious and ashamed—envious of the joy they take in their surroundings, and ashamed of the past decisions I've made that continue to deprive them of a fuller, richer joy.

I wasn't born with an indifference to land; that indifference was nurtured by the steady pursuit of a modern, urban lifestyle. I haven't verified it, but I'm confident that around the Saint Peter community I hold the record for rootlessness. I was born to an Army sergeant and his wife in the Portsmouth Naval Hospital , and grew up on military bases in Virginia , Turkey , California , Arizona , Virginia again, and Colorado . At that

point I was old enough to sever the few family ties that were left, and so my college years were spent in Michigan and Massachusetts , followed by jobs in Indiana and Texas , where I married my wife Debbie. Since then she and I have owned homes in Dallas , Boston , Dallas again, Silicon Valley , outside of Austin , inside of Austin , ten miles west of Pikes Peak , and now Bristol . And we hope to soon sell this house and build a new one in Mendota.

Those are the facts, but they don't tell the tale. My early years of travel resulted from my father's commitment to the Army, an organization as unconcerned as any multi-national corporation about shuffling workers for its own convenience. After I graduated high school, my father and mother returned to his family home, where they have lived for the past thirty years. But years of transient apartment living had taught me that ties to home and family were in fact shackles, a sort of slavery for which I had no interest in volunteering. And so for another twenty years my GPS coordinates were determined by considerations of career, scenery, weather, cuisine—but never by attachments to people or institutions.

And then in Silicon Valley , in a miniscule townhouse with a patch of grass barely worthy of being called a yard, a child was born to us, and the world changed for me. I watched my son toddle around that yard, with nothing but a concrete patio and a plastic playscape to be investigated, and knew that it was wrong. I didn't know why it was wrong, but at least I knew that it was wrong. And so we returned to Texas , in search of land and community in which we might set down roots. Our stay in Austin lasted ten years, all of them in search of a liveable balance of work, family, church, and community. We never found it; two homes and four churches later we pulled up roots and moved on, and then moved on again. And again the kids found a good corner in a new yard, and proceeded to make it their own.

What had driven us on was what had always driven us on—a desire to arrange circumstances to our own taste, to find a place where we could dig just the right well, plant just the right vineyard. We ignored the simple truth that Paul had spoken on Mars Hill, that God had determined from all eternity the preappointed times of men and the boundaries of their dwellings (Acts 17:26b). Instead of gratefully accepting our God-given times and boundaries, we sacrificed stability and elected to spend much time, energy, and expense in an effort to improve them—with predictable results.

Would that we had taken a lesson from our own children. They always accepted their new circumstances as being the best for them, and began again to search out the depth and riches awaiting them within yet another set of boundaries. We could have learned sooner that a life is not an off-the-shelf thing to be sought out in far-off locales, but something that is crafted slowly, carefully, and lovingly from the materials that God has placed at hand—the people of the community, and the land they inhabit.

It would be easier for all of us to submit to that lesson if we inhabited a rich land, one filled with all kinds of good things we did not provide, wells we did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves we did not plant, a land that had been slowly, carefully, and lovingly cultivated by our fathers and their fathers before them, a land that was a legacy passed on to us as stewards, a land that we would in turn pass on to our children and theirs. But our birthright was squandered long ago, the mess of pottage is long since eaten, and in these particular preappointed times it will require profuse sweat to reclaim the land for our posterity.