On Home.... and finding our way there

I could never bear to be away from home.

Homesickness thorned my side as a child. It snapped at the heels of my adventurous spirit waking me in the night on school trips or childhood sleepovers and filling me with an intense… sadness. Nothing was really wrong but something wasn’t right.

I would make up excuses to get taken home in the middle of the night, struggling to live joyful in the moment, always desperate for the returning home, the sense of something wrong, somehow coming right.

Of coming home safe and simply being known. Even in all its imperfection that we don’t understand when we’re small, I longed often for the home that always let me curl up small and be loved. Safe and known.

That’s the grace of home.

Now I live in a world where over 60 million are displaced from their homes. This is where I live now. In a world where children are fleeing from a war torn land so ravaged and desolated they were forced to fill their empty bellies with grass.

This is where we live now. Where 60 million people call home a tent, a camp. A Wilderness.

How do you make home when there is nowhere in the world that wants to know you? I feel it even here, here in our apparent freedom and safety, where we have nothing to flee and yet I look into eyes everyday that can’t settle into home, into eyes that are aching to be accepted and yet just find themselves staring into dark loneliness. All unknown.

60 million are running for their lives and the rest of us are just aching to find a way to live with it all.

Someway to make home.

All this talk about walls, as if it’s a new phenomenon that we live in a world where the human heart wreaks all selfish. Don’t I feel it everyday in the small corners of my life? I battle this desire to pull the walls of my home around me to make me feel a little bit safer? Shore up the bank account to help me breathe easy. Wrap my friends and family and little life around me so that if I cocoon it all up enough around me, none of this dark might get in. All this breaking and broken, how can I keep it out? Don’t I know these thought veins that run through my heart?

“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”

This trinity of love. God chooses this heart. Into this beating mess within us that flows with selfish intent, untamed thoughts and an unholy riot comes the Almighty and all Holy. Builds His home within flesh and bone. Chooses these weak vessels to fill with Holy heaven and blinding light and all that’s good.

And all the great big joy of heaven makes its home in me.

Yes, heaven chooses us. All out of love the Father draws near. All out of longing to be near us. All out of knowing He made us for something more, He gives up holy heaven to make His home in the imperfect place.

Yes, Grace comes here.

By Grace God builds His home here in me and it’s not by privilege or wealth or education or geography or some social lottery that He chooses but just because

Grace says so. Loves says

this new home where Father, Son and Spirit choose to dwell is where you will become all that you cannot be. And all the spaces within you that cannot be filled by anything or anyone else become filled with joy unending and all the wrong is silenced by a hope spoken in this home that says one days all will be made right.

Where we’re well and truly known. Heaven comes to know us and makes a home right in the middle of flesh and bone.

And so wherever we find ourselves and whatever happens…this is where we can live now.

This invitation into perfect love from a perfect God who chooses to be wrapped within an imperfect people. And as we love Him here, learn to be loved within this Holy community making all things new in me He whispers soft

Keep my word.

To keep, we have to treasure, hold tenderly and pull in close these truths. To keep, we have to breathe in grace- this gift of community birthed in us by a Holy communion. And as we keep, keep the words and all its words that speak and do love and mercy and justice to the outcast and the foreigner and the hurting and the wild crying of  this world we would become lives that are

laid down and wrapped up small so that we might fit in tenderly into broken places. Might they be lives that would be

laid open so that we can be wrapped back up around those who simply need to be held. Miles and miles away from home. So that they would be

Known. This is how we become homemakers in a land so far from anything that feels safe. We keep the word and let it dwell in us richly.

This is where I long to live. This is where we’re called to live, doors open, hands stretched wide, wrapped inside the lonely and the longing, building home from the inside out.

Filling the spaces left by gaping wounds with love. Offering up hope for all that is not yet.

Oh if only we could see the privilege and the gift

That this could be our home now.