The new (old) house

It’s so good to be back in the Sierra Valley

It’s a weird sensation being “on-leave from call,” but here I am.

My last day serving as pastor at Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA was August 2nd. I had every hope to stay until October 1st, which would’ve gotten me to exactly three years, but due to real estate dynamics and school schedules, things happened a little faster than we would’ve liked.

Alas, wow, how good it feels to be back home here in Loyalton, CA. If you’ve followed this blog for more than a few years, you know that we lived here from 2020-2023. Moving here then was a fluke. It started as a pandemictide visit with my in-laws that turned into a first-time home-buying event whilst I finished seminary (largely online).

We wanted to stay here, but in order to be ordained in my denomination, I had to be called (aka ‘hired’) by a congregation. And there were no congregations within driving distance of Loyalton that were eligible for me to work with. So, I was given a slate of a few congregations in my (very vast) region (which spans most of California and Nevada) and that’s what brought us to Aptos. Which was amazing and lovely. I mean, I can’t complain about living on the Monterey Bay for a few years serving an incredible little parish who somehow put up with me and all my hijinks and rookie enthusiasm and fumbles for a few years.

But recently, we started to realize how much we missed our family and friends in the Eastern Sierra Nevada region. And the Santa Cruz, CA area is astronomically expensive. So, we started looking at real estate here in Loyalton. And the coolest thing happened…

See, when we were here in our previous stint, a friend of ours in town approached us. She’s the owner of the Mercantile Store and the Hardware Store (and a lot of other places and things that only she knows about) in Loyalton. She’d just put her gorgeous childhood home up for sale. Her mother was living there until she’d recently died. Kim wanted someone she knew to live in it (and preferably, a young family). So we were one of a few parties she invited to take a look at the place.

Right when we walked up to this big old white house (yes, old—built in 1941!) and walked through the front door, we fell in love. There was plenty of room! Old world colonial charm! A full basement equipped with poker room (stay tuned and I’ll share more from there)! A laundry chute! A Christmas Tree Window! We like old and quirky and vintage and this place fit the bill.

Yes, the house needed a decent amount of TLC, but it had been well-loved during its life and very well-built.)

But like I said, I couldn’t find a job/call here. So, we moved. To Aptos.

Well, early this summer, when we started looking at real estate here (we first looked for more affordable housing in the Aptos area, but there was nothing cheaper than the home we lived in), there it was! On Zillow. The same old white house. They pulled it off the market a couple years ago and just so happened to put it back up for sale. Gaaaah!

So, after a long real-estate journey (you might know how that goes), here we are. And we can’t be happier. This time, moving to this little rural Northern California cow town is not a fluke, but a Spirit-led decision.

The big realization we had is that what really matters about a place is the people. And especially, family. Aptos is gorgeous… World-class… On paper. It’s one of the most scenic places to live (and the real estate prices reflect that). But our people weren’t there. Yes, there were plenty of great people we met there and hope to keep in touch with. But not OUR people. Let me tell you a bit about what happened in those wild pandemic years when we lived here before…

We could easily drive to Reno to visit my cousin and my brother and sister-in-law. My in-laws lived a few blocks away from us. They started the best restaurant in Loyalton (which isn’t saying a whole lot in a town of 900 people), and it quickly became a community hub. We lived right across the street from it, so we were there a lot. We met a lot of people there and quickly found a small but mighty friend group consisting of people who were at least half as weird as we were. And we’d have all kinds of impromptu meetups and dinners and hangouts. Unplanned and serendipitous.

See, that’s what got us about Aptos (and Chicago and other places we’ve lived). Getting together with people was hard. We’d have to plan dinner hangs and ‘play dates’ with kids weeks or months in advance. But here, people just… Swung by. We’d see at least one or two people we knew around town every day. When we’d go by the hardware store, mercantile shop, post office, etc., people knew Rory’s name and talked to her. She felt super known here. As did we.

So, even though this town has fewer than 1,000 people living within its boundaries, it feels… full. While living in a bigger, busier area was more isolating. And lonely. Sure, I had a church community I was serving, happily. But not my own friendships. And no family nearby.

Now… Had we given it another three years in Aptos, who knows?! And some of this was on us. Living in a super expensive place means that you have to work more (unless you happen to be passively wealthy, which currently, we are not). And when you work more, you have no time for building friendships. But here, in Loyalton, the cost of living is such that we have room to breathe and focus on things/people other than w-o-r-k.

Yes, it’s a little tight right now. I don’t currently have a j-o-b, but according to our calculations, we can get by for a while on solely Alex’s income. I’m pursuing some top-secret ministerial opportunities (stay tuned) that will hopefully arise sooner than later, but for now, I’m staying busy with home repair projects.

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Before I get back to said projects, I want to mention this space… The last few years, since becoming an ordained person, my main focuses (focai?) have been (1) being a present dad/husband and (2) learning how to be a pastor to the parishioners who called me. It’s been a journey, learning the basics of this vocation. And it meant I didn’t focus as much on the blog here. Sure, I shared my homilies here as well as a few posts here and there. There were a couple times I thought I might be able to generate some consistent effort into it. But I kinda felt… Guilty, to be honest. There was this thought in the back of my mind whispering to me that my parishioners would get angry at me for spending too much time working on the blog when THEY were paying me to work for THEM. However, what I heard was the opposite.

As I was wrapping up my time in Aptos, several members—out of the blue—said how much they hoped I could write and share more here.

This was what I needed to hear from them. Turns out a good number of them saw this blog thingy as part of the package when they called/hired me and were kinda bummed I wasn’t keeping up on it.

I breathed a sigh of relief hearing that.

So… Here’s to this new chapter of my life. More to come, for sure. But until then, I gotta paint a kitchen, hang some bookshelves, and fix a screen door.

Drop a word below and say hey if you can.

In Joy,
Jonas