This week concludes our Book Club and we’re so excited to present this chat between Logan and Sophie!! Grab your favorite drink and check it out!
Click here to watch video if viewing in an email.
Allume: It’s where My People are
Home is where my people are, there is no doubt about it.
We’ve journeyed through the pages of Sophie Hudson’s engaging new memoir, Home is Where My People Are, and met her people there. In so doing, I’ve been inspired to truly grab hold of my own – both those who live in memories, down streets I don’t live on anymore, and those held within the confines of our literal home today.
And yet, here in the final pages of the book, I am reminded that I can be in the midst of all my people and still grow a little lonely. Not all of me, lonely, just a part of me, but a central part. That place inside a creative woman of faith who thinks deeply and attempts to write it down, that’s the place inside that longs sometimes for fellowship. Like a sensitive artist sitting on her stool in the core chamber of her own heart – she needs people too.
I went to Allume last fall knowing one woman. I guess you could say that instead of having “people” I just had a person. Kelli was my person. Instead of a tribe, I had a kemosabe. However, something noteworthy about the Lone Ranger is that he really wasn’t so all alone with Tonto by his side.
Seated around the bonfire we call Allume I began to meet new people, women who shared my vision, who carried a similar fire in their bones and a passion to communicate those flaming tongues to others. From all around North America they came, one by one, carrying stools of their own to sit upon, as we gathered together, drawing close in community.
At the end of the conference we picked them up again, each woman going her own way. I left the hotel knowing that I now had people, not just a person, that I knew I’d see again online. But a part of me was sore at the thought of not fellowshipping together with flesh on. Do you know what I’m talking about? Face to face and up close.
As providence had planned, I found myself seated on the plane next to an Allume attendee I hadn’t met in the previous days. Discovering that we lived an hour and a half apart, we exchanged social media handles and purposed to keep in touch. Jaimie also shared with me a list of other ladies who live in Southern California, not far from us. I scribbled down their names too.
Six months later I did something daring – I reached out to 8 relatively local bloggers (all allume alums) and suggested we gather together to encourage one another.
Encourage. Even now as I type the word I see its root – Courage. It takes courage to invite new people into our lives. What if they say no? What if they realize how small my platform is? What if they affirm my inner dialogue that I don’t quite belong here?
Oh, but I didn’t give in to the lies. No, instead, I befriended them all on facebook and sent a group message saying, basically, “Let’s get together.” Wouldn’t you know it, they responded with a resounding, “Yes, let’s!”
And now, after one amazing afternoon walking through gardens, sitting in the shade of a weeping willow, and enjoying afternoon tea together (until the maitre’d firmly told us, one last time, that the place was closed) they are something quite special to me. They are My People.
Becky Keife, Laurir Wallin, Caryn Christensen, Jacque Watkins, Denise Hughes and, not quite so all-alone, me.
If you have been on the fence about joining us at Allume this fall, let this testimony call you warmly in. You are welcome here. There is room for you amongst these people. There is room for your voice online. There is room for your stool at the fire this coming October.
Join us!
Two are better than one,
because they have a good return for their labor:
If either of them falls down,
one can help the other up.
But pity anyone who falls
and has no one to help them up.
Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm.
But how can one keep warm alone?
Though one may be overpowered,
two can defend themselves.
A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.(Ecclesiastes 4:9-12)
Seasons.
I read Home while traveling on a plane. Oh my goodness! I was quite the sight as I laughed OUT LOUD for 3 straight hours. I didn’t care if I was more annoying than a crying baby. No one was going to stop the amount of joy I got from Sophie’s book.
Being that I spent 20 years in full time church ministry chapter 18 had me especially giggly. All the words and phrases that Christians over use are so spot on.
The one I am especially latched onto right now is the word “seasons.” I say it to myself and others ALL.THE.TIME.
“Oh, it is just a season.”
“Don’t worry about it. This season will pass.”
“I just love this season of life.”
Because I happen to be in a tough season as we wait and wait and keep waiting for answers regarding transition (another one of those words we love) the over use of the word season is driving me bonkers.
I suppose we get it from Ecclesiastes 3.
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.”
I act like this tough season will end and I will magically swoop into a season of only fruit and flowers but the truth is that all seasons have highs and lows, flowers and rain, snow and ice, sun and stars so the questions isn’t, when will this season end? It is, what can I learn from this season and how will it help grow me in the one to come?
I would enjoy hearing your take on the word “seasons.” What does it mean to you?
What word had you smirking in chapter 18?
The Honeymoon is Over
Oh boy. Chapters 13-15 ushered me into a full on meandering down memory lane. As BooMama recounted her early days before her marriage, and those first few years afterwards, I couldn’t help but recall my own adventures and misadventures. We married at 20; by all accounts we were still children, wrestling to live like grown-ups. Marriage was much harder than I imagined. Way harder than anyone let on.
In all fairness, it is possible that I was too busy drooling over floral arrangements and completely unaffordable bridal wear to really HEAR the sage advice that was being offered in the months leading up to our wedding. I might have been slightly distracted by the fact that I was working two jobs and driving myself back and forth to Macon in the sweltering heat of middle Georgia during the high noon of the summer.
Whether people had tried to tell me, or they hadn’t, that first year of marriage tried our patience with each other. Our cleaving rang with the sounds of doors slamming (me) and cars motoring off into the distance (him).
In Chapter 14 Sophie talks about how she had known David for 20 years and still they felt like strangers in the beginning. As I read this I nodded and said things out loud like, ” Right??!!” and “Amen”. After our 4 years of dating we felt confident that we knew each other well–and we did, but marriage and dating are NOT the same.
And as He did for BooMama and David, God used these hard days of growing up together to teach us about sacrifice, submission and what love really means. We moved a couple of times, and church hopped, just like they did. We fought and made up and found our way through the immaturity and selfishness of our youth, into a place of willing surrender, compromise and generosity. We learned to communicate and respect each other, and discovered that while challenging, demonstrating grace is not impossible.
While my husband maintained a steady job, I found myself job-hopping more than I would have liked. I had to laugh at BooMama’s eager search for an English teaching job, only to keep finding herself in the role of Spanish teacher. Oh God has such a sense of humor. I’ve worked everything from retail to waitressing, to working at a car dealership, to a brief stint as an admissions rep at a University. As much as I wanted to put my college degree to use, I continued to get jobs that had me spending huge amounts of time on the phone. I was good on the phone. But none of those were my dream jobs.
By the time I found a job that I really liked and was good at (and had potential for upward mobility), we started our family and I traded the office life for being a full-time mama. Then we moved. Again.
Thankfully, by this point, we had been married for 5 years and while the honeymoon was long over, God had brought us a long way into a much sweeter season of mutual respect and understanding. We had fully become a team in those 5 years before our first baby was born, which was a good thing because that first child–well, lets just say he wasn’t a good sleeper.
What I am saying is that he didn’t sleep through the night until he was 3 YEARS old. Three years of sleep deprivation is a ghastly thing–if that doesn’t test your marriage, nothing will. I’m grateful to say we passed the test. God knew what He was doing. (Of course He does.)
I sat down to read chapters 13-15, and found myself engrossed well beyond the end of chapter 17 before I had to set the book aside to make Easter dinner. If you’ve been reading along, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this season of life.
What were your early days of marriage like? How did God stretch you during a particular season of transition?
All Over the Map
At this point in the book (chapters 10-12) I began to have full-on flashbacks of life through college and into my mid-20s. I have a distinct advantage of only being a year behind Sophie in all of the school milestones. Our experiences were different, obviously, but the culture was the same. 90210, In Living Color, Santa Barbara… all of this was apparently required college viewing.
Also, while many fine institutions of higher learning dole out degrees for a BA, BS, MS, MFA, Ph. D, Ed. D…. one of the most highly coveted designations is the MRS! I was an overachiever and got my MRS. the summer between my junior and senior years. That was nearly 24 years ago in case you are like Sophie and not so much a fan of the maths.
My life didn’t follow a path like that of the characters in any John Hughes or Joel Schumacher film ever made. Ever. It was, however, deeply marked by the steadiness of college friends in my major and at Campus Crusade. There was a surprising quantity of speech pathology majors who were also in Cru, as it’s called now. This is where may own personal faith took root on Thursday nights for Prime Time, my small group, and Wednesday noon prayer group. College would’ve been very different without these people. James Madison University was home for 3 years.
Just after I turned 25, my life started being marked in the opposite way. This was the beginning of all the moving, with all the boxes, to all the different states east of the Mississippi, and the roots have to learn to adapt and grow quick. It was the unfamiliar that permeated every place and every activity. At first, there were tears and resentment and nothing was going according to my plan!
HA!!!
My plan!
As if!
This is when being a fairly extroverted person is VERY useful in the whole survival department. This is also when faith and commitment make church a non-negotiable and finding one is right up there with finding out where to buy groceries. It’s absolutely necessary. At the store you find the food – some you’ve never seen before in your life – that sustains your body. At church you find the teaching and community that sustains your life. You find your people. You find that each new place is home.
As the title says, “Home Is Where My People Are”, whether you are in the 90210 or any other ZIP code.
How have you made where you are located your home?
The Eighteen Year Old Syndrome
Sophie talks about her first taste of working from home and relishes in the fact that she could do it in her pajama’s.
At 18-years old, she was doing far better things than I was at that age. Yes, 18 was my year of “rebellion”. Finally an “adult”, who bought her own car, I decided it was time for me to call the shots. It’s not that I went off the deep end or anything, but I did hang out with a less-than-stellar crowd I called my friends. Many of them were several years older than me, and most were male.
I called myself a Christian, but didn’t always do the “Christian thing”. I sometimes set my convictions aside so I could be part of the gang. Not that I want to put out the wrong message here, but they were little things, such as smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor; not things that completely changed the course of my life. Except maybe in the right direction.
The more I suppressed the Spirit, the easier it became to compromise. I definitely was in the middle of an identity crisis, not to mention a relationship crisis with my boyfriend/fiance’ [who’s now my husband]. There was a short season when we were not together and I decided to explore other options.
Needless to say, I didn’t like the other option. I mean, you could call it a crush, a rebound, whatever. But the “other option” didn’t have an interest in marriage — as in, ever. As a girl who grew up without her dad at home, I guess I was pretty eager to start my life. I wasn’t interested in wasting my time on flings. Not to mention he had no interest in God. No, the grass isn’t greener sometimes. Sometimes, you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. Sometimes, you think you know what’s good for you but you don’t.
Sophie made mention of that when dealing with accounting in her sister’s business. She didn’t do well with numbers. She thought it would be fun to move to Atlanta simply to spend the summer somewhere other than her hometown. She didn’t take into account there was work involved in agreeing to help with this business.
Eighteen-year-old’s are funny like that, aren’t they? They want all the benefits without sowing and believe there are no consequences to making poor choices. But, we both learned valuable lessons during that year of our lives, so that has to count for something.
This is when I learned Sophie and I are about 10 years apart. Our childhood’s don’t look anything alike, even though I remember so much the 80s. Yet, we still learned some of the same lessons, just in different ways. That just shows me that God can work in any circumstance, even when we are a hot mess at eighteen years old.
So, when my boyfriend/fiance’ and I decided we were better off together rather than apart, we decided to push our wedding up. You see, we were quite literally engaged when I entered my senior year of high school. He proposed before having a ring, but then spent all summer saving up to pay for one and I bore that pretty ring on my left finger all throughout my senior year of high school. Other than my circle of friends, I didn’t draw attention to it because, really, I knew people wouldn’t believe we were serious.
There were a lot of reasons we got married so young. (By the time we’d gotten married, we had been together three years.) But my housing situation needed to be remedied and since we planned on marrying anyways, we just pushed it up and planned it in 3 months flat. With our own money. Today, we joke about how redneck it was in some ways.
We married in a park, had our reception in that same park, with picnic tables covered with dollar store, plastic table cloths. We also had BYOB on our invitations. You know, Bring Your Own Beer, because we weren’t even of legal age to consume it and if people wanted it, they’d have to bring it. We weren’t concerned about impressing anyone, that’s for sure. We wanted a simple wedding that didn’t break the bank.
I was nineteen when we exchanged our vows and I have never regretted marrying when we did. Yes, we both went to college and worked full time, but we managed. It may have been what helped us build such a solid foundation in our marriage. If we could survive that season, why not have lots of children and and a few pets, too! (Side note: we have seven children, 3 dogs, and a parakeet).
What do you remember about being eighteen? What stands out the most?
Broken Pieces From the Past
But that’s what stinks about the parts of us that are broken and hurting. We try our best to keep all the pieces and shards gathered and contained, and we trick ourselves into thinking that they’re not affecting other people.
Eventually, though, our need to feed what is broken starts to overpower everything else, and those hurting places make us careless and reckless. Before we know it–and sometimes after it’s too late–we look around and see that the people we love the most have been wounded in the collateral damage.
This quote really stuck out to me in Chapter 4. And I think this tells me a lot about myself and some of the issues I face today because I came from a broken family. My parents split up when I was six years old and I have felt the ripple effect of that for years to come. That’s the reason The Rink was such a place of refuge for me. That’s when I got to see my dad. On the weekends.
My husband feels it and so do my children. There’s just no way around that type of change. Some people are better at [appearing] to hold themselves together through it all. That’s me.
But after awhile, an unraveling begins to take place that you cannot stop because it’s been piling up for years. It shoots out like a hose, all over those you love. It’s hard to contain once it busts out.
…
Now, I wasn’t a child of 70s, so I couldn’t relate to everything Sophie shared from those years, but I used to watch That 70’s Show and that helped me be able to nod at some things. 😉 Still, a few things did carry over to the 80s, such as the telephone lines being connected and your parents being able to listen in on your conversation using the phone in the other room. Yes, remember phones with cords, and dials?
I love how Sophie’s book invites us to remember these things together! I don’t know about you, but I’m having a blast! Her telling is helping me remember.
Do you ever have people do that? When they talk about something and it reminds you of your own “something”? Isn’t community a gift? Truly.
She mentioned in chapter 5 (her list of activities) that she enjoyed perfecting her royal blue mascara and it reminded me that I used to wear a smokey blue mascara. It almost looked like a chalky color. That stuff was all the rage, though you wouldn’t be catching me wearing that now. In fact, I don’t wear much of any kind of make up now! I rarely have the time to put it on!
If you have read chapter 6, you probably died with [sympathetic] laughter at Sophie’s experience with a tanning bed. I wanted to just reach in the book and give her a hug! Or a pat on the head so I didn’t hurt her! She’s such a brave soul to share such a sensitive part of her life that none of us would have ever known had she not been so bold to share! If you haven’t read it yet, take my word for it and go read it.
What one moment do you remember from growing up that has shaped who you are today?
Where is Home?
The opening of Sophie’s book enlightened me to a few things. She was right when she talked about how lucky she was to grow up in a church that was so family oriented and didn’t care that she would play the organ while her mom lead an aerobics class each week. It’s a rare gift that children can touch much of anything in a church that isn’t located in the nursery. That’s not to say children should run amuck and be out of control. But what if more churches welcomed children as a blessing rather than a nuisance?
I just love Sophie’s warmth and wit throughout these pages. I found myself laughing out loud in public places and feeling the awkward stares. Oh but it is worth it!
I didn’t grow up in church, well at least not the conventional way. My family wasn’t Christian, but God had a way of finding me. I was a church hopper. Any opportunity I could find to attend church with a friend, I would take it. He drew me in. So, although I didn’t have a solid church that I could call “home”, Sophie had me seriously thinking about what places I did call home as I was growing up.
And there’s no doubt; it’s the place my dad worked when we were growing up. The place I considered a refuge and reprieve from my daily life at home. It was a roller skating rink. Not exactly a church, but it definitely served as a kind of sanctuary for me.
{My Dad, the Head Honcho and DJ}
I spent the entire weekend there, along with my brother and sister, hanging out while my dad worked.
Most of my friends came skating near every weekend. My childhood best friend, whose parents also worked at The Rink (that’s what we called it), was there and I LOVED skating. It was my favorite pastime — I still love it when I can get out to do it.
{An old newspaper story: Me on the left and my childhood best friend on the right}
We always had the best New Year’s Eve parties there. My brother and sister and I used to help him set up for the party by using an air tank to blow up hundreds of balloons which we would then store in bags on the ceiling until midnight. We spent hours filling these balloons, only to have them fall to the ground and watch all the skaters pop them with their skates in about 90 seconds. But it was worth it! For 90 seconds, The Rink sounded like bubble wrap on a large scale.
My best friend and I used to make up skating dances for the employee Christmas parties each year. And who can forget the time I [accidentally] broke my little sisters leg. Yea, I’ve never lived that one down! This is the place I had my birthday parties, loved racing with other skaters, learned to “funk skate” (although not very well), and was allowed to chastise other skaters for breaking the rules, because, well, “my dad is the manager.”
But in 1994, shortly after I had turned 13-years old, The Rink was set on fire on a Sunday afternoon in April. The previous night some teens or very young adults were removed from The Rink for fighting, (back then we called it “kicked out”).
My dad received a phone call the next day, early afternoon, from one of these guys, asking if they could return that day. They already had a plan. My dad replied, “No”, and about an hour later, I smelled smoke (which I described as burnt marshmallows) while I was playing video games (you know, the big arcade type you stand at). Turned out, the storage room that was near the arcade games had a fire in it–set from the outside.
After everyone was evacuated I walked to a safe distance to watch (across the street). We were later told the smoke could be seen for miles.
It didn’t hit me until the CO2 tanks from the pop machines in the snack bar blew that this fire was doing some serious damage. Damage that would never be rebuilt.
I lost a home that day, and I felt the effects of that loss for years to come.
My brother, sister, and I used to sit around and talk about, “If The Rink was still up…” scenarios. I had dreams about it for years.
But then I think about where I am today and maybe it would have been different had The Rink not burned down. Was it a tremendous loss? Definitely. But, maybe a necessary one.
I love how Sophie’s book got me thinking about my own childhood, because I don’t go there often, simply because I don’t find it necessary. But it was so sweet to ponder back on these memories. It was almost as if her words, without saying so, simply invited me to reminisce with her. She told me her story and I quietly pondered my own.
What about you? What is one place you called “home” when you were growing up? What made it a “home” for you? Feel free to either leave a comment, or write up a post of your own and share your link below.
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{Official} Book Club Announcement and Schedule
I am so excited to announce, officially, the launch of the Allume book club, starring Sophie Hudson’s, “Home is Where My People Are”!
I have been reading this and, seriously, you do NOT want to miss out on this opportunity to gather with some friends for some laughs, and some serious, southern comforting words.
Now, I admit, I am not from the south, but I feel like I could be. If it weren’t for my Michigan drawl, that is. But seriously, I love a lot of things deemed southern and when I read Sophie’s book, I nod in agreement and wish that things were more like that here in the Midwest!
I’m excited for the coming weeks and want to invite YOU to form a book club of your own. You can do it on your blog or within your church or local community.
We are giving away 200 books to the first 200 people who sign up for one HERE.
WE ARE ALL OUT!
{Please note, only the first 200 people who sign up will receive a book, so don’t wait!}
And if you have never heard of Tyndale Rewards, you just have. They give you free books and Bibles — yes FREE! So be sure to go check them out and sign up for some free goodies!
Here’s the schedule for the Allume Book Club, hosted right here:
March
11th: Week 1 – Ch 1-3
18th: Week 2 – Ch 4-6
25th: Week 3 – Ch 7-9
18th: Week 2 – Ch 4-6
25th: Week 3 – Ch 7-9
April
1st – Week 4 – Ch 10-12
8th – Week 5 – 13-15
15th – Week 6 – 16-18
22nd – Week 7 – 19-20
29th – Close – Logan and Sophie Web Chat
Will you join us or host your own book club?
