ON HOME
When I was 23 years old, I hopped on a plane with a one way ticket.
With only three blurry photographs as proof that I indeed had a room, I moved to a new city with what can only be considered pitiful savings and next to no backup up plan. I arrived on my new front doorstep only to be ushered in via the back fire-escape as we gave wide berth to the caution tape keeping folks like us from treading on the new - and may I say, oh so necessary - swath of porch paint.The ensuing three years have been filled with what feels like an insatiable search for what or who or where home can be found.
I've been to few concerts in my life, but I have a very clear memory of Josh Garrels’ seminal album 'Home' being released that same fall I moved. Weeks later, in a profoundly bare living room, my roommate and I vowed that our house would be more than just a place to store - as my friend Bev likes to say - “our box of socks.” Our little apartment would be a place for people to “all just walk each other home” as Ram Dass once said - a space for our community to feel a sense of walking each other towards our true home.
Since then, my life experience seems hell bent on both preventing me from putting down roots, and prompting further contemplation of the spiritual significance of home. I've done a season of splitting my life between two cities each week. I've done long stints on the road. I've commuted across the country between offices, and internationally for business and pleasure. I've tried to define home according to a type of architecture, coordinates on a map, an ethos, an accent, and even a person. Each fit well for a time, but not entirely. I still felt like something was missing and so, after a time, I resumed my search. What was the missing piece of the puzzle?
In the years that have ensued, I’ve come to the realization that this hunger for home - this question of where or what or who home can be located - is an entirely theological, and therefore reasonable, search. As a person of faith, my longing for home is rooted in a task that is set before me: to usher a sense of the kingdom of heaven – my true home – into the here and now. To act in light of God's forgiveness, grace, and double command of love, to create a sense of home and belonging in the here and now, a foretaste of the restored creation to come.
My discomfort and search for home is not actually born of discontent. Rather, it is an ontological orientation, a symptom of the yet-to-be-completed creation. This longing is actually evidence that this sense of belonging, rooting - home - is a giant journey in the right direction. It was C.S. Lewis who so wisely put words to this hankering for home when he said “If we feel inside us something that this world cannot satisfy, it can only mean that we have been created for another place.”
And so, this search for home makes us folks of faith a people of pilgrimage. We are not so different from our ancestors, the children of Israel wandering in the desert for 40 years in search of the Promised Land, their Promised Home. The words of Genesis 52 are with us still. “...God will surely take care of you and bring you up from this land to the land which He promised on oath to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob."
I write this ensconced in that same old apartment I first turned up in, those first months post-university. It turns out that life spent between two cities and on the road doesn’t hold the sense of home I thought I might find there. I’ve become accustomed to living with a sense of the search deeply lodged within me - a holy discomfort, one might say. And while I still find myself wondering how my sense of home will ebb and flow over the years to come, I’ve accepted that this sense of the search within me is a sign of the stirring of my kingdom-home in my soul.
