Someone Else's House

Abiding in Hope

by

Iowa Annual Conference | March 28, 2024

In about three months, I’ll move from a house that isn’t mine to another that isn’t mine. Both houses are parsonages, owned by the church I currently serve and by the one I’ll serve next, respectively. We pastors sometimes live in houses like these. Someone else’s house.

In a culture where home ownership is highly valued and often regarded as a mark of successful adulting, it’s peculiar—and somewhat unsettling—to find oneself in someone else’s house. 

There are a lot of ways this can happen. Maybe we move back in with our parents after we’re an adult. We might in a later stage of our lives find ourselves living with a sibling, or one of our offspring—in their house. A child in foster care; a grandchild taken in by their grandparents, a longtime friend who’s fallen on hard times: I can think of myriad instances in which people I know by name have found themselves in, or welcomed another into, a house that is not their own.

I most keenly felt that sense of being in “someone else’s house,” oddly enough, when we moved home to the house on my family’s farm. It wasn’t that the house was unfamiliar; I grew up in it. But my parents lived there for years before and after my growing up—more than 50 years altogether. They died just three weeks apart, and we moved “home” a few months later, more than three decades after I left for college. In the rearranged fusion of some of my mom’s furniture that perfectly fit that house, alongside the many pieces we brought with us, I had this lingering, strange feeling that I was still in my mother’s house.[1] Walking through that space, it took a long time to think of it as mine.

I remember pondering this not-my-house-ness and wondering whether my mom felt that, too. Her grandparents built that house in 1902 and lived there until the 1940s. In between then and 1956 when my parents moved in, other relatives lived there: my mom’s aunt and uncle, and then mom’s sister and brother-in-law and their young family. This house was one of two home places at which family would gather across decades, so she would have been in and out of that house regularly, her whole life. It never occurred to me to ask her about her own experience of making it her own. I never asked, “How long did it take you to feel like it was your house?” 

Have you lived in a house that wasn’t your house?

Living in a parsonage is a different version of not-my-house-ness. It’s partly that it belongs to a church, not a family. If you need something fixed, you call the trustees, rather than a repair person, and you might have to wait for someone to address it. If you don’t love the kitchen cabinets, it’s not really an option to change them out. If your dog tears up some old carpet, it’s not just between you and your dog (and your pocketbook); it involves a church that might regard the destruction of that carpet as a big deal. Knowing this is how it works, I’ll admit I was a little anxious becoming a parsonage-dweller, after years of ministry in which I hadn’t had to depend in those ways on the church trustees. 

Nearly four years in to this experience, I can report that life in a parsonage has been better than expected.[2]

But there’s a whole different way, though, that a parsonage feels like someone else’s house:  I know some of the pastors that have lived here. Especially when we first arrived, I’d find myself thinking of those pastors or their family members stoking up the fire like I just had, or working in the kitchen, or walking down the sidewalk to the back gate that leads over to the church. I was told that before the church building was completed, the choir used to practice in the parsonage basement, which was also used as an office. Sometimes I can almost hear the echoes of those sung harmonies—or of the clicks of a keyboard—reverberating within those walls.

It's curious that never happened in the three houses my husband and I bought and occupied in the years before these not-my-house experiences. We didn’t build those earlier houses; they had housed other families before we moved in.[3] Yet I don’t remember ever thinking of those houses as anything other than mine. Maybe it was the formality of making a bid and having it accepted, and doing all that paperwork, and then being handed the keys that seemed to erase any vestige of the humanity of those prior occupants.

But of course, our homes are almost always “other people’s,” in some ways. Someone else probably built them, and others have lived part of their lives there. Even if we design and build the house of our dreams, there’s a way we end up thinking about the “other people” who will want to buy it eventually.[4] When we look across the length of our days, we might realize we’ve spent large swaths in spaces that weren’t just ours, at all—our parents’ homes, barracks, college dormitories, apartments, and eventually retirement communities, assisted living, and nursing homes.[5] Too many of our fellow humans would include jails, prisons, rehab centers, halfway houses, detention centers, and homeless shelters on such a list, for more time than we’d wish were true.[6]

And what about the Native Americans who occupied these lands before properties were mapped and bought and sold and “owned” the way we’ve conceived of it? We’re all in “other people’s houses,” in a way. 

The more I think about all these experiences of houses—the ones that felt like my own and the ones that weren’t—I’ve begun to conclude that the “mine”-ness matters less than I used to think, and the details, as well. When I was a young professional, I’d pore over books of house plans that I’d sometimes pick up in the grocery aisle; I’d imagine how amazing it would be to have that house, arranged just so, if I could ever afford it. When the time came when I probably could have, that ideal seemed less important than it did at first. The longer I’ve lived, the less I’ve come to care about the perfection of the space I inhabit. 

Don’t get me wrong; I’m really grateful for a good, accessible, pleasant space in which to live. I’ll soon move into another parsonage that promises to be comfortable and well cared for, which will make me feel comfortable and well cared for in turn. This is important, and I’m grateful.

But wherever we live, we have this treasure in clay jars (2 Cor. 4.7). The apostle Paul wrote those words of our human bodies, but our homes aren’t that different. We hold everything—ourselves, our treasures—lightly, knowing that it’s all temporary, and that we’ll move and things will change, and who knows where God will call us?  

Indeed, in Jesus’ own example—and in all the ways we recall during this holiest of weeks—Christ came to us as to what was “other.” Christ was, in the beginning, and from all time, God, and with God (John 1.1) in the heavenly places. And then God took on flesh and lived among us, in this earthly “home,” as Jesus (John 1.14). You can’t get much more not-my-house than that, if you’re God! Jesus lived in this human flesh that we inhabit—our “house,” so to speak. We glimpsed the glory of his heavenly form in the Transfiguration, bright beyond measure on a high mountain, conversing with Moses and Elijah. But in most of his life, he allowed his glory to be veiled, housed, in our flesh, as one willing to yield himself without reserve for our sake. It is through that gift, Jesus’ life and love and death and resurrection right here in our midst, that we have received life, thanks be to God.

And we are invited to offer that same gift to others. What “other people’s houses” might God be preparing for us, even now, as God’s work continues in the world?

 5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

6 who, though he existed in the form of God,

    did not regard equality with God

    as something to be grasped,

7 but emptied himself,

    taking the form of a slave,

    assuming human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a human,

8     he humbled himself

    and became obedient to the point of death—

    even death on a cross. (Philippians 2.5-8)

[1] It was Dad’s house, too, of course. My father did a lot of work through the years in that house, wallpapering, painting, refinishing, and more. But it was Mom’s eye, Mom’s intention and energy, that directed every decision about said wallpaper, paint, and refinishing, along with the choices and arrangement of furniture, the arrangement of antiques, wall art, and more. I don’t think Dad would quarrel with me describing my sense that I had come to live in “Mom’s house.”

[2] This arrangement has definite benefits, and I’m grateful to our very attentive trustees. When the garage door opener, or an electrical system, or the refrigerator’s icemaker gives out (all of which—and more—happened in the four years of this my first parsonage experience), it’s not my bank account that’s responsible for the repair. When there’s a light fixture that needs attention, or a dryer duct that’s clogged, there are willing and able hands to help get the problem resolved—which is particularly helpful because my husband and I are not what you’d call “handy.”  

[3] Two of those houses (oddly), even belonged to people we knew before we bought those houses! In one case, we figured it out from photos we saw when we walked through the house; this family went to the same church we did. In the other, the family was walking away from the house when the realtor met us there, and I recognized the husband as a co-worker at the job I was leaving to pursue the call to ministry that brought us to that town. They, too, ended up attending the church we pastored. (Small world!)

[4] How many of us have spent thousands of dollars making improvements just before we sell it to those next people, which we might have really enjoyed had we done so earlier?

[5] Thinking across history, this list would include plantation quarters where enslaved persons were housed. Contrary to what you might be told if you visited a plantation site that’s open to the public, there is nothing romantic or redemptive about this history of human bondage in “someone else’s house.” These buildings were places of degradation, deprivation, and agony. 

[6] Having mentioned prison, I feel compelled to make this very personal appeal for you to pray for LeAnn, who is preparing for a parole board hearing on April 2. LeAnn has waited a very long time to be able to return to her own house, after decades of exemplary behavior in prison. Her release is supported by dozens of letters and appeals. Please pause right now, and through these days, and pray with me for her release: “O God, let LeAnn go.” Thank you.

The Rev. Lee Roorda Schott serves as pastor of Valley UMC in West Des Moines, Iowa. This post is republished from "Abiding in Hope," a spiritual formation project of the Iowa Annual Conference. This content may be reproduced with full credit to the author and linked to the original post.