L.A. Native-ish

Arriving just a couple weeks before Christmas 1975, my first breath in this world was on Ventura Canyon Rd, Panorama City. Southern California welcomed me with open arms on a mild 60 degree winter day. Twenty miles in from Santa Monica and just a short drive south to Disneyland, I landed in the sunny San Fernando Valley. The heart of L.A. beat proudly in my chest as a City of Angels native…..for about a month until my mom packed up and moved my older brother and me to Klamath Falls, Oregon. We traded the beach, Hollywood, Mickey Mouse, and SoCal sunshine for a tiny, cold, high desert town in the mountains. We had family there, and my mom needed a fresh start and help raising two young boys, so we made the move and never looked back. Do I tell people I’m from Los Angeles? Technically yes I guess? I was born there but left while I was still breastfeeding and pooping in a diaper, so does that still count as being an L.A. native? If I ask someone who is truly from there, the answer is probably, “Nope”.

My wife on the other hand was born right here in Southern Oregon, where we live and have raised our family for the past 31 years together. She came home from the hospital to a big white house just a few blocks from our current home. The old schoolhouse where she went to kindergarten is right across the street from our front yard, and she still stops to chat in town when she sees her elementary school teachers. She is from here. We can hardly go anywhere without running into someone she grew up with or has known at some point in her 50 years here in this small valley. Truth be told, even if I did know as many people as she does, I likely wouldn’t go out of my way to say hello. Somehow she seems to never forget a name or a face, and will often re-introduce herself to someone she hasn’t seen in a few decades. She thrives off of making connections with people and acknowledging them. It’s really quite incredible, actually. Not at all the way I function. If I don’t have your contact in my phone and we haven’t seen each other in more than a couple years, chances are I’m just gonna keep on walking. Maybe you’ll get a head nod or a, “Hey! Good to see ya,” but that’s about as far as it’s going to get. But that’s a whole different issue altogether that I’m working through.

Sometimes the narrative about where you come from is more complicated. For me it has contributed to identity issues, feeling isolated, and questioning where, or if, I “fit”. I don’t know my biological father either, so that has sometimes added to the confusion and gaps in my own identity. Learning a bit about my heritage has helped me to mentally put some of those pieces together and not feel quite so fragmented. I’ve also had the blessing of being adopted by my step-dad when I was a kid, and he has taken me as his own son and truly shown what the spirit of adoption is all about. I better understand the depth of love that is described by being “adopted” by God because of the way my own adoptive dad has loved me. Over the years I have taken on many of his mannerisms and characteristics, often having people tell me, “I sure can tell that he’s your dad.” Maybe it’s just the matching bald heads, but something tells me it’s more than that.

What’s your origin story? Do you know both your parents and your family heritage? Did your family bounce around a lot so you had a difficult time putting down roots anywhere? Maybe your family history has been lost due to estrangement, slavery, or some other tragedy. For some of us, the narrative of our own origins is difficult to think about at all, let alone talk about it. Regardless of what your story is, where you came from, who your parents or grandparents or great-great-great grandparents were, you are here now. You are present in this life right now. You are loved, seen, and important right now, where you are, with all the brokenness and baggage that come from life on this planet. If you are reading this today, it means you are alive. You have the opportunity to live, to breath, to have joy and hope and laughter today. Your past doesn’t define you. Your origin story doesn’t define you. You, I, all of us who have accepted the offer to be adopted by God and call him Father, have an identity that nothing and no one can take away. We are given a new heritage, a new place where we fit, a new place to call home. God says, “I have called you by name, and you are mine.” I may not be a true L.A. native, but I have a new origin story. How about you?