In the past 4 weeks, I have experienced mecca milestones. I hiked over 70 miles with Greg and reached the Kumano Kodo shrines of Hongu and Koya in Japan. The challenging trail ascents and descents were necessary to arrive to these spiritual meccas.
Joy, Greg and I went to my birthplace Boston to join Ng relatives for anniversaries, re-acquaintances, making plans to visit ancestral China homesteads in 2020, and a visit to my childhood home and school in Roxbury. We went to see where my father’s hand washed laundry once was located. Today, it’s a commercial center now called “Grove Hall Mecca!”
We visited Forest Hill Cemetery where family graves are all lined up 5 in a row–a mecca of remembrance. My seminary, Andover Newton made a wise and strategic decision to leave Newton Centre to be embedded in Yale Divinity School. We made a maiden trip to New Haven. This is another mecca of theological education. It was inspiring to see my alma mater thriving and growing in a new home.
Finally, I traveled to Valley Forge to attend the dedication of the new ABCUSA offices where the next chapter of ABC life will take place along with other ABC mission partners. They are creating and becoming a “Baptist neighborhood” granting each other more flexibility and nimbleness. I had a meeting at the new ABHMS offices and entered the office where Lauren works when she is at her work mecca.
Going to the new ABCUSA office, I saw on the corner of my eye the 1962 Mission Center, fondly known as the “Holy Donut” where I worked for 20 years. Now it is vacant and ready for demolishing to become a new recreation center for the rapidly growing population in King of Prussia. Some meccas withstand the test of time while others were never expected to be permanent in the first place. We celebrate the closing of one door in order to open a new one.
I am ready to return home to San Francisco and Sausalito, the meccas where friends, loved ones and memories now reside. Visiting meccas in the past and nurturing meccas of relationships today provide the promise of still more mecca milestones to come.