home sweet home

I am going home next week.  It has been five years since we last visited.


Funny that a place I haven’t lived for almost twelve years is still “home”.  Perhaps it is because the house I am going to is the very one I arrived at thousands of times with a sigh of relief.  I have climbed the tree in the front yard hundreds of times.  I have rollerskated in the garage until I was dizzy.  I have laid on the floor and read Sunday comics, baked cakes in the kitchen, and cried countless times in the bedroom down the hall on the left.


I am always nervous before trips like this one.


As much as I am looking forward to sleeping in, eating out, chatting with my mom and dad over coffee, and watching my children play in the ocean, I am anxiously awaiting the peaceful ache of home.


The fear that nibbles at my plans is this: what if home doesn’t feel like home anymore?


All the energy expended the last few years to satisfy that longing for home by hiding in God actually may have worked.  


Of course that wouldn’t be a bad thing entirely.  But to feel nothing in a place that what once was home would be bittersweet.


After having my soul wander through moving to Nashville and then back again to Austin, I sort of wish that I could say definitively that there is still a place that feels like home.  Like a cushion for all of these providential punches we have taken for the sake of following Christ, I long for a place that is free from the strain of this life He has chosen for us.


But this is an immature, short-sighted wish for me to make.  After all these years I still know more in my head than I do in my heart.  My mind tells my heart that the only place I will ever find true rest is in God Himself.  My heart wants an easier way, though, so my mind must guard my heart from its folly. 


A home in God is a safe place of peace and love that reaches beyond my own moments and days.  This faithfulness to Him grows up around my children and my husband until we are so surrounded and protected that there is never any reason to fear again.  Easy it is not, but superior to any home made of wood and brick and cement it always will be.  


Faith in an eternal God who lives to be our eternal home is sturdier than we could ever hope.  It is large enough to house generations of children beyond my own, and is more than worth the effort to build.


Remembering that truth when I walk up those brick steps and past that climbing tree takes all the pressure off of a forty year-old house.  It can protect me from the weather and provide a cozy spot to rest without having to satisfy the longing in my soul for peace.


Because my true home is who God is, I can carry it with me everywhere I go- even when the place I am headed is home….