“Our heart’s cry is that God would awaken our community through our humble church plant—that Parkerites would not be so easily satisfied with their lives, but that they would seek and surrender to Him, forging a new life with the Gospel at the center.”

“I will move anywhere but Parker,” I said several times as we were abruptly relocating to the US one year ago.  We were church planters living in the Czech Republic when we found ourselves backed into a corner, unexpectedly the only ones able to respond to a health crises in my father’s life.  As we progressed through the jolting process of packing up and moving “home,” after living almost 15 years and raising four children overseas, we tried to discern how we might best respond to his crises.

Anywhere but Parker, I said, because Parker for me was pain.  My parents divorced when I was eight and while my mom remained in Denver, where I was born, my dad forged a new life, 45 minutes away.  Parker—then a small town—may as well have been on the Kansas border.

During the divorce I was asked with whom I wanted to live.  As a loyal kid I could not choose one parent over the other.  So for a decade I went back and forth on a weekly basis—Denver with Mom for a week and Parker with Dad for a week.

My dad was excited about his new life in the country.  His girlfriend had a few acres, a few horses, a barn.  He and I began spending nights out there.  I remember restless sleep, my eyes flying open and wondering where my dad was.  Lying on her couch I would try to see anything in the kind of darkness found only beyond city limits.   Was he sleeping in the car?  My young mind was yet unacquainted with the fluidity of adult relationships that existed outside my parents’ unhappy marriage.

They had a small, outdoor ceremony on a cold day at her little ranch.  Thus began my part-time childhood in Parker, Colorado.  And when you’re a kid, you only know what you know.  You don’t know that all that alcohol and yelling and crashing dishes isn’t okay.  You follow your dad when he wakes you up in the middle of the night and says in a trembling voice unfit for a man of his size, “We have to go.  Be quiet.  Hurry.  Get in the car.”  You know you’re scared but you don’t know what to do with it.  You don’t know that your surroundings are toxic.  Until you leave and gain perspective.

After I left for college sadness lay on me like a heavy blanket.  The Lord allowed me to succumb to my sorrow, that I might cry out to Him for relief.  Through the dusty Bible on my dorm room shelf, Jesus began to breathe new life into me.  As I surrendered more and more to Him, I really did become a new creation, just like He said I would (2 Corinthians 5:17).  I married.  We had a baby and we left for the mission field with a newborn, mere babes ourselves.  My dad never, ever called.  Life went on in Parker.

After 22 years of marriage and after Alzheimer’s and Dementia set in, she left him.  They had moved to an even more remote ranch and the isolation had bred even greater brokenness.  I got calls from the social worker, the judge, the doctor.  He was really sick and going to be my ward or the state’s.  And so, under duress, we prepared to leave—just not to Parker, I said.

I’m typing this from my kitchen in Parker.

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