Los Angeles 2025

I started this as a response to a social media post as Los Angeles wildfires 2025 destroyed many neighborhoods and put lives on hold. I wanted to expand on my reply because just as I did, the original poster had relocated to the city of LA from somewhere else.

LA has become my home, too.

Despite almost 10 years of unsettled housing, despite opportunities that haven't happened (yet) Los Angeles is the first ever time for me that home is here and not the last place I just left.

Maybe you create a social media ID that includes your place. "Leah in LA" or "suntreeriver design Los Angeles." Like Benedictines and others who aways name their community after their city or town of residence, we can do that, too. Do you attend Lazy River Presbyterian Church? Hillside CIty Lutheran? Streetside Methodist? The building or the campus and the people who gather there then have their place in a double sense: a location defined by longitude and latitude and where you almost instinctively know your place (role, function, job).

The USA and many other countries have been impacted with frightening political, social, and economic uncertainties. Unprecedented wildfires winds recently leveled Los Angeles area neighborhoods.

In the wake of destructive fires back in my previous place of San Diego, one Sunday morning our parish associate reminded us God does not have a preferential option for a particular dwelling, neighborhood, or structure over any other. Then why did we again see one or two untouched houses or businesses beside others that were total losses? God doesn't prefer certain houses or places over others, but God does have a preferential option for those whose homes and lives have been destroyed or upended, those whose expectations have been shattered or sometimes simply not met to the degree they imagined.

As Pastor Gordon said long ago, "We're not snake-bite proof. We're rescued after being bitten."

Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez first used the phrase "preferential option for the poor."

Early on this blog in Longing for Home, I wrote about home is always the place you just left: a memoir of restless longing and persistent grace by Betty Smart Carter.

Homecoming has been one of my relentless longings and after all this time it feels impossible. Impossible? But Possibility is my star word for 2025! Late last year, I longed for home in a Five Minute Friday ass I dared say what home could be:

…people who quote Philip Philips' song Home, "Just know you're not alone; I'm gonna make this place your home."

Deep in our hearts and with our entire beings, we long for the hugs and the smiles. The shared meals. Affirmations of our dreams, our calling, our gifts and preparation. Encouragement for our longing to use our talents and abilities. We long for and we need somewhere and someone to come home to at the end of the day, whether the day has been disappointingly short or agonizingly long.

Home is a spacious place. Space to breathe, to reach out, to grow, and to dream. A location and a people who take away my lostness, who help deliver me, because they delight in me.

My scripture reference was, God brought me out into a spacious place; God delivered me because God delighted in me." Psalm 18:19

Can home be in a place of blight, broken glass, fragile dreams, when there were any dreams at all? What name would we give that place? Is that the kind of situation we need to be rescued from? God would rescue us from?