Reset

It was late October, 2010. Our team was gathered on a late Tuesday morning, just like the Tuesday morning before, and the Tuesday morning before that. Our weekly worship planning meetings took place immediately following an hour-plus long full staff meeting, and usually around 11:30 a.m. the caffeine and empty carbs from breakfast would vanish from our bodies, leaving us in a creative slump and dreaming about our imminent lunch plans. I’d served on the staff at Wheatland Salem Church for eleven years. I knew the routine.

This day was different. We’d tapped gold.

It was a concept brainstorm for a sermon series that would mark the beginning of the new year. The idea was simple: draw the masses on Christmas Eve with and invite them back to hear about something that was on everyone’s minds… the recession.

But it wasn’t just about global profit loss or corrupted bank heads. It was about you and me and the loss we all felt on a daily basis, knowing full well that we had placed our hope in something or someone that was failing us. The system was broken and every person in our wealthy suburb knew it. Every week we heard another story of a well-respected CEO who had to come home and explain to his kids about why his company’s restructure meant they had to sell their house, or a hard working sales person who was just told she was being put on a 100% commission plan to “increase her motivation”. In the middle of our conversation, I realized that the reason that all this talk of recession and housing market made my heart race and mouth get dry: this was my story too. I began to share with my colleagues.

We bought high, and at the peak of the market in 2005, so we could live within walking distance to the school my wife taught at.

Here’s our house:

It rocks. It has an in ground pool, 3 bedrooms 3 bathrooms, a fenced yard and and 2 gazebos. You read that right: two (2) freaking gazebos.

It made sense in 2005, but in 2007, when we decided for her to take the stay-at-home mom route, we realized we needed to move. Though the house was conveniently located near her workplace, it was a 30-45 minute drive from our friends and family, and in a highly car-dependant suburban neighborhood, far removed from the standard amenities of everyday life – public transit, grocery store, elementary schools. This might have been an okay setup for some families, but given the fact that we were a one-car, one-driver household, it made no sense for us. Add to all this the fact that I’m about as handy as that Bob Vila… after a a few beers… and a fifth of whisky. With one arm. I’m not exactly homeowner-material and our house was full a quirky, project-creating mess.

That was 2007. We were now in 2010, and after three years of hesitant, on-again-off-again, “don’t-settle-for-too-little”-mentality real estate sales techniques, we were tired and confused. Our entire adult lives we had received the preaching of the real estate investment gospel. The idea of making money off of your property had, at least in the back of our minds, become part of our life plan. It worked well for us when we sold our town home in 2005… certainly if the trend continued we would could continue our housing upgrades for years to come.

In 2008, the truth of that gospel came unraveled, and I don’t think we were the only ones reeling from the effects of the disappointment brought by the housing market crash.

The difference was, that, unlike most people struggling to make ends meet, we actually wanted to get rid of our house. Something deep within us recognized that our way of life — consuming more than we were creating — didn’t make sense in the grand scheme of things. We had grown weary of having to drive everywhere, collecting pre-garage sale knick-knacks and investing a large percent of our weekly scheduling into maintaining this plot of land, concrete and dry-wall structure we call “home”. We were suddenly awakened to the longing for something simpler and more time to dedicate to things that mattered – our young children, our friends and family, experiencing art, music, nature and allowing our attention to rest on the beautiful things that we already had instead of being fixated on what we lacked.

As I shared my story with my worship planning comrades, and listened as they shared their own stories and the stories of others in our community, there was a single word that bubbled to the surface of mind, poking through my subconscious and nagging my attention. A word that described what we all sensed our upside-down mortgage riddled community longed for… and the type of new start I wanted for my family:

Reset.

Little did I know, while sitting in that Fall planning meeting, that coming months would bring far more resting into my life than a simple sermon series. More on that later…