Where are We Going (and Why)?

Dearest Family and Friends,

We’re moving to Tennessee! We make this announcement with a mixture of great excitement and real sadness: excitement, because this move opens up a number of personal and professional opportunities, especially for Mark. But also sadness, because moving requires us to leave a place that has been our home and a community of people that we have come to love more deeply than seems possible.

Mark has accepted a position as Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Johnson University. This feels like a genuine homecoming. Johnson has been around for 120 years, and it’s played an important role in our family history. Mark’s parents met while students there, taught there when Mark was a child, and now Mark’s father serves as President and his mother as the First Lady. Mark’s maternal grandparents spent 27 years working at Johnson, and many aunts and uncles graduated from there as well. So we are thrilled to bring our own young family to a place that is so special to our larger family’s history. Mark’s role will be to teach in a new Ph.D. program and also as part of an innovative new undergraduate core curriculum. It's an old Johnson tradition that there are no Monday classes. This tradition goes back to the days when student­ preachers who spent their Sundays preaching in area churches needed an extra day to travel back to campus. So no more Monday mornings for Mark, which he's pretty happy about.

Michelle and the girls are looking forward to life in Tennessee too. Michelle plans to spend the next several months concentrating on her Ph.D., an opportunity that has been a long­time coming! After that, she will explore the next step of her vocational work. She is looking forward to being closer to her own kin in NC, especially her daddy’s cooking! Annalise, Eleanor, Adelaide and Josephine all have their own hopes for the move, the greatest of which is being closer to grandparents (read: spoilage!) and cousins (read: fun!fun!fun!). A new family dog seems to keep making the hoped­-for-­list too! The move means a new school, a new home, new friends, and a new way of doing things for all of us. At times there’s real fear about all the changes this move brings, but for the most part, we are thrilled to start this fresh turn in our family journey. Adelaide calls it our “Tennessee Adventure!” (which sounds like a great ride at Dollywood!) and as with most things, Adelaide has framed the experience well for us all.

In all of this, we are reminded that the most defining moments of life are often the most bittersweet. Our family has a lot of teachers in it, but as we look back on our lives here in Rochester, we know that we have been as much student as teacher. If the goal of the Christian community is to promote growth in love of God and love of neighbor, we are humbled to have been able to see that goal embodied in so many of you. Thank you so much for sharing your lives with ours. And we hope that it will continue to be so. Please know that we’d love to have y’all visit us in East Tennessee! Don’t be a stranger, as Dolly likes to say, and do come on down our way any time.

Michelle often used the theme of pilgrimage to help her students better understand the scope and nature of their educational experience. Pilgrimages often take unexpected twists and turns, but we also know that the unexpected stops on a pilgrimage can lead to the most profound encounters with God’s holy presence. This stage in our pilgrimage is certainly unexpected! But we take the next step in the hope that it is a response to God’s call, that it will take us closer to our ultimate goal, and so we step forward as those who are bathed in the hope of the Resurrection. As we take these first new steps, we ask that you will all hold our family in your prayers. We will now and always hold you all in ours.

Yours in Christ,
Mark, Michelle, Annalise, Eleanor, Adelaide, and Josephine