I’m not sure but that I don’t always feel a bit homesick.
We’re in Ontario, right now, and me with two little boys crowded on my lap trying to find their way back to that safe place.
We returned from BC one week ago, spent two nights in our own beds and then, gone again, and Aiden plays on the beach now, sand in his hair building castles and moats and running in the water and clapping and at the end of it all, “I go home now,” he says. One day into our vacation.
It doesn’t matter the sunshine, the food, the newness of it all, home is somewhere safe for him. And it is for me, too. But I’m not sure that I’ve ever found that safe place in a building.
Even now our “home” doesn’t feel like one, with half the walls and flooring missing. And it’s been good this way, reminding me that everything on earth is kind of empty.
The way a seashell is: hollowed out and sounding of somewhere distant yet familiar.
And I keep listening to the empty sounds inside of me calling out for a God I’ve never physically met. A God whose lap I long to crawl onto.
“The ache for home lives in all of us,” writes Maya Angelou. “The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
Courtney Walsh uses this quote to introduce her second book in a startling new series about a town called Sweethaven. A town we all inwardly belong to, a town of people trying to belong and don’t we all? Don’t we go through life just trying to feel like we matter?
And yet, these characters in Walsh’s series, they do matter. To each other. In spite of the hardships they endure, the very real hardships which Walsh bravely addresses (like custody battles, and affairs), they belong to each other. They are home for each other.
And I think this is maybe church? A home away from home? A home away from heaven? And why can’t it be so? Why have we made it so awkward and lonely?
Yes.
I don’t know that I haven’t always been a little homesick.
Today, I'm honored to be giving away a copy of my friend Courtney Walsh’s SECOND book in the Sweethaven series, A Sweethaven Homecoming … to win, let me know what “home” means to you.
sharing with AWIP, Jen, Jennifer, Laura, and Michelle
Home would be where I'm safe - maybe my husbands' kiss or him praying over me, maybe a phone call to my girl friend on a particularly hard or even terrific day, maybe feeling the arms of Father God around me while I lay in my bed needing an extra special touch in that lonely space only to be filled by Him. That's Home to me.
ReplyDelete“If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a 'wandering to find home,'' why should we not look forward to the arrival?”
ReplyDelete-C.S. Lewis
I have to keep reminding myself that what we think of as “home” is only a temporary accommodation. As a Christian, I believe that we are all going to live forever, that our soul transcends mortality. Where we end up is important and that place will be as wonderful and as glorious as our deepest, God-given desires have promised it to be.
But I am not one for throwing away our lives or our planet. That final place is a home that I can't really even understand right now, and so I am forced to invest myself where I find myself right now. God needs us to live in the present.
As I mentioned, although the soul will transcend mortality, the body will not. It will have to be broken down and decayed and torn apart by disease and insects and all manner of nature before I ever get a new one. But there WILL be a redeemed body.
And as sure as there will be new bodies, there is also to be a new Earth, one that is our ultimate home.
But like I said, that place isn't home for us just yet. It will be someday, but I really buy into the idea that home is where I am right now.
And that is my philosophy on home. Home is where God has placed me right this second of my life. I am about to become a Resident Assistant on a large college campus this fall and I noticed from living in the dorms my freshman year that many of my friends often felt crushing homesickness. I am sure this problem will affect many of my residents this fall as well.
The problem comes not only from missing their loved ones, but also from a poisoned mentality. This mentality fails to recognize this campus as their new home. Despite what they think, home is not where their parents live. They are FROM the suburbs, or the big city, but right now, that is not their HOME. HOME for them right now is a crazy, cozy dorm room packed into a big, bustling residence hall.
And this is essential for them to understand.
I find that the students who tend to think of their new living conditions not as a building but as a community, not as a room but as HOME, are more satisfied with their time away at college. They are actively involved in restoring their immediate environment and creating a community of love, friendships, and trust. As they move on to other stages in their lives, they will learn that having once created their own homes away from home, they will be able to do it again someday…they will do the exact same thing with future roommates and friends and someday with a spouse and children, with a family of their own. And I suspect they will be surprised with the task’s ease.
It is the necessity created by the reality of our immediate environment that drives us to create “home.” But home is transient. We know that we would do well not to grow too attached to one particular point in our life (guys, think about all of the friends you have who only talk about “the glory days” of high school or college. They are missing out on what God is providing for them RIGHT NOW.). I suggest that, similarly, while it would benefit us not to invest our COMPLETE hopes in our current, temporary homes, we need to work with everything we’ve got every single day God gives us. And we need to do this exactly when God has placed us. Today.
The Earth as it is now is not our final destination, but a fixed point in the present. Our hope should rest in the final, glorious homecoming that Jesus promised he would bring. But we also need to recognize that, until then, home is where God has placed us right now. We need to invest ourselves in redeeming and serving those around us, dedicating ourselves to working to our fullest in our immediate environment.
And someday, I know that I will be rewarded with my true home.
That’s what home means to me! ☺
home for me is that place that waits
ReplyDeletewith a me-shaped space
and when I'm there
i go weightless
because of the way
it folds around me so gentle soft
and yet i'm completely free.
deep glad sigh:)
-Jennifer
E,
ReplyDeleteAlways struggled with the word "home". Still do.
i feel homesick most everyday and sometimes i groan with it and i don;t know what it is i want. heaven?
ReplyDeleteI wrote about the scent of home a couple of days ago...that's pretty much what home is to me.
ReplyDelete{by the way, my boys -- especially Noah, my oldest -- always say they want to go home during the first couple days of vacation. They usually settle into a routine by mid-week, but I get that displaced, restless, uneasy feeling, too. I am a homebody at heart.}
Home - the kind of home I strive to create, anyway - is one of peace and sanctuary. A haven from the world beyond the doors, with it's craziness and chaos and strife. A place where I can breathe and operate at a pace better suited to my temperment, not the frenzied pace the world demands of us. My ideal home is comprised of candles, and quiet, and a cup of hot tea, and a purring cat by my side and a sleepy puppy at my feet, and a good book followed by a nap with a soft breeze ruffling the curtains.
ReplyDeleteHome is where I hear my children laughing and feel my husband's arms around me. Geography plays no role.
ReplyDeleteLove the seashell imagery -- "hollowed out and sounding of somewhere distant yet familiar."
ReplyDeleteHome is a place you can feel safe. I just had the sweetest experience of home sitting in a living room of a rented house on borrowed furniture. But it was the *people* who made it home. They listened to my ugly and didn't let it scare them away.
I was loved and I was safe. Yes, to me, this is home.
For the Christian, home has to be heaven. Earthly home could be being with those who have invested much love in you--or where you have invested much love in others, but for me, there are places that feel like home to me. Sanctuary. Very definitely place as well as people.
ReplyDeleteHome is where my peeps are. Where I feel safe and comfortable and myself. It where I can be off...if that makes sense.
ReplyDeletei agree that home is not connected to a building... i've felt strangely at home in the weirdest and most unfamiliar places and sometimes felt crazily homesick while sitting in my house.. wishing you a good holiday time em
ReplyDeleteHome is where my husband is. He represents God and Heaven to me. Where I can have the unconditional love that nobody has ever shown me, and where I cry from happiness just thinking of the gift God gave me in him. We were apart for so long last year when he was in Iraq, and even now when we struggle, with ourselves or money or anything, I am just thankful that I can finally reach out and touch God's gift to me. He's my home until I can go to my final Home.
ReplyDeleteHome is where I can just BE. I love going home after a long day of work. And if going to that home, the home where I have to make dinner and clean up messes I didn't make and wash clothes I didn't where and clean up after a dog I don't like all that much, is a place I long to go after a hard day at work... Just imaging what going home to Jesus will be like. Bliss.
ReplyDeleteThat should be wear. :(
ReplyDeleteThat seashell. Yes, hollow, but familiar, an aching sound.
ReplyDeleteI'm homesick, too.
Home is where I can find God in the quiet places, under the quilt with the fraying stitches, in the grace of the woodpecker on the tree beyond the window, on the bathroom floor in teary puddles. I lived with severe homesickness during our year in Texas, but not for a place so much as a grasp of Him who seemed so lost to me there. Home is where I know just where to look to find Jesus.
ReplyDeleteWe just got home from Ontario and our cottage that makes me feel like I'm leaving home until next year. I'm wearing my Canada shirt today, feeling a bit homesick. But before I even read this post I was thinking that what I miss is the wonder and joy that so easily spill out in that place. And maybe that's what we long for in the homesick, the wonder and joy that makes our eyes widen and jaws drop open. The place where we lay down on the couch that bears our imprint.
ReplyDeleteMy son, who has Asperger's, often utters the small, but determined "I'm ready to go home..." whenever his surroundings start to overwhelm him. He looks around a bit frantically and then he finds my eyes and he presents me with his declaration. Because it IS a declaration...he WILL be going home. And I'm suddenly struck...MY surroundings, this world, my life....all of it, often overwhelms me too but, I must only follow my son's lead. I simply declare to it all that I am going home...for isn't all of life a journey home...and suddenly we are in the eye of the storm and there is peace...
ReplyDeletethe hollow rings loudest when they speak of this "family", this "local body" that keeps slapping my face. yes, i'm homesick. if i could hug you right now, i wouldn't let go for a while.
ReplyDeleteHome...being with my husband where ever that may be. He makes me a stronger person and makes me feel at ease in any situation. Don't know what my life would be like without him!
ReplyDeleteHome is my husband, my brothers, and my sister. With them around me I know I can face anything. But, most of all, home is knowing that the Lord is in control and in Him I can rest knowing all is well.
ReplyDeletePatricia sissy51@suddenlink.net
Home is so many things to me. It is four brick walls with beauty and color inside, air swishing round people bursting with love, honesty, and frustrations. It's messy and livable. Home is the one tiny space I can run to on this planet when all other doors and windows are sealed shut. It's a place of forgiveness and change and memories. Home is like a mirror's reflection of who I've grown to be.
ReplyDeleteHome means safety and familiar. It means family and pets. It means comfort. It means love.
ReplyDeleteI know that feeling, Emily.
ReplyDeleteYour sea shell analogy is perfect. I suppose there will always be a part of us that yearns for being home with Him. That's what we were made for, right?
Outside of Jesus, Rick is the closest I have to feeling at home. It's not cliche for me when I think of the words to Billy Joel's song "You're My Home". We've lived in a lot of places, but none would feel like home without Rick. And I think nothing will truly feel like HOME until we're with Him.
Love,
Laura
Home is where the comfort is. For each of us, it's probably just about the same thing: where love exists...where love flows back and forth.
ReplyDeleteI think heaven is the only place we'll feel like we truly belong - because I'd think nobody knows more about hospitality, welcoming and making one feel at home than God - however, I do think that when you are living where God has placed you - that you feel at home. I learned that a few years ago when God picked us up and moved us elsewhere for 2 years away from where we'd lived for 19. The contrast allowed me to feel home all the more vividly!
ReplyDeleteHome is my refuge--where I can cozy up with quilt and pillows and cats in my comfy recliner with a good book or my Bible, devotional books, and journals.
ReplyDeleteIt's where the clutter reflects us--husband and me--where mom and dad's beloved books and collections mingle with ours. It's where I can retreat after a chaotic day teaching high schoolers and deal with chronic pain in a quiet and safe environment surrounded by my husband's love. It's where photos of kids and grandkids greet me from the fridge along with Erma Bombeck quotes and my posy vases of garden flowers and herbs brighten up every corner. It's a part of me.