Celebrating the First 10 Years

Two-year-old Timmy McLaughlin's eyes widened, and a look of surprised delight spread over his face, as David Fitch set a match to the logs he had piled high in the old fireplace. It was Timmy's first bonfire—and the last event of a long and wonderful day.

The occasion was Sojourners Community's celebration of its first 10 years in Washington, D.C. We had ventured out of the city on a warm September afternoon to Dayspring, a retreat center run by Church of the Saviour.

We exercised our last burst of summer stamina and closed out a grand season of volleyball that afternoon with marathon matches we modestly dubbed "The Volleyball Championship of the Universe." The children rode bikes, picked apples, and wandered over to greet a variety of animals by the Dayspring farmhouse.

Dinner was a feast. A crew of community chefs kept watch over a long grill loaded with chicken and fish. Baked potatoes, cole slaw, corn on the cob, and watermelon rounded out the menu. Surprisingly enough, everything was ready at just about the same time, despite the fact that the corn refused to boil.

Before we all sat down to eat, Jim Wallis led us in a prayer and some reminiscing. We recalled that Michael and Nathan Tamialis, now 11 and 10 years old, were just infants when the community took a trek and made Washington its new home; none of our other children were on the scene at all. We thanked God for a decade of growth, struggle, and joy—and for the chicken. Then all of us gathered around one long family table we had made out of several smaller ones.

Halfway through the meal, someone at one end yelled, "It's time for the wave" (a little move some Baltimore Orioles fans in the community picked up at the stadium one evening). One by one down the long line, people stood and raised their arms and sent the "wave" from one end of the table to the other and back. This was great fun but did not help to encourage the children to eat.

AT THE END of the meal, the benches were pulled in a semicircle around the fireplace, and David set ablaze the firewood he had gathered in the woods that afternoon. Then Janice Johnston led us in an evening of singing, starting off with such camp favorites as "In a Cabin in a Woods" and "The B-I-B-L-E."

There was a special reappearance by the "Gopher Girls," an ensemble brought together for our First Annual Weekend-After-Groundhog's-Day Sojourners Community Talent Show eight years ago—back by popular demand (looking older but no wiser). For our three community members who passed their 50th birthdays in the last decade, there was a special walk down memory lane with a medley of songs including "The Old Mill Stream," "The Old Gray Mare," and "Daisy."

Michael led us in songs he learned at Bair Lake Bible Camp last summer while visiting his grandparents in Michigan, ending with the ever popular "When the Saints Go Marching In." David was a hit with his song "For He Puts Out Fires." He sang a line or two, and then we all joined in on the refrain, "For he puts out fires." (It took only three tries to get us all singing it correctly.) It went something like this:

My brother Bill is a fireman bold.
For he puts out fires.
He went to a fire last night, I'm told.
For he puts out fires.
The fire caught on some dynamite
And blew poor Bill clean out of sight,
But where he's gone, it'll be all right.
For he puts out fires.

Several people made fools of themselves. The laughter was abundant. Keary Kincannon got us all sounding like bagpipes at one point. And as the evening grew later, every round we tried to sing degenerated into "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." It was time to break out the marshmallows.

While some of us devoured s'mores, others got out guitars and resurrected the '60s. A wide variety of music flowed forth, and there were moments when the singing seemed to sound like Peter, Paul and Mary and look like the Temptations. Jim Tamialis followed the ubiquitous "If I Had a Hammer" with his own rendition of "If I Had a Phillips-head Screwdriver."

Finally the fire died down to a pile of embers. The guitars were packed away, and graham cracker crumbs stuck to globs of marshmallow and chocolate were wiped off the faces of the children. A bit of serenity descended as we gathered around the last glows of the fire. David got up to give a last poke to the embers, and a lone voice from the circle sang out "For he puts out fires."

Timmy was still talking about the "big fire" a week later. I asked him how big it was, and he spread his thumb and forefinger as wide as he possibly could and said, "This big!"

His 6-week-old brother, Joey, had slept through the whole thing. He doesn't know what he missed. Maybe in 10 years, we'll remind him that he was just an infant on the big day of the big fire.

Joyce Hollyday was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.