Christianity Archives - Page 15 of 41

Home

In my mind, I live in house that has stood longer than I have, built by hands that lived before my time. The floor creaks and the stairs are warped from generations of feet climbing up and down, softly wearing their reflections into the wood.

Ancient trees reach out arthritic hands to knock on the windows when the winds blow up, and out in the orchard, I can spend hours under gnarled apple trees and watch as the fruit swells fat and ripe. Decades have passed since shovels broke the dirt and turned the soil and sank saplings into the earth as a kind of security for the years to come.

This place, this home I imagine, is a place of generational blessing, where babies are nursed in the same rooms they grow up in, and the same rooms they sleep in when they come back with children of their own. Here, change is never sudden and new is measured in years, not hours or minutes. Each passing season brings a deepening in me—a peaceful settling in, the way a house settles in to the earth until it’s hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.

I long to be home like that, where home is a part of me, like the skin I live in.

But I’ve never had that.

And I never will.

All my life, I have been transplanted just as soon as the roots have started to wriggle deep into the soil. Once a handful of memories are created, they are packed up and moved on to a new place that doesn’t feel like mine, that doesn’t feel like me.

And every single time, I feel like a bit of plankton, floating about in a great big sea, with no idea what part of the blue is up, and what part of the blue is down, and all I want to do is plant myself somewhere for a great long time.

But the waves won’t let me.

It is my calling, and I know it, to be always a stranger, always a sojourner, always longing for a place to return to that does not exist. In a sense, everywhere is home, and nowhere, all at once.

My heart breaks over it sometimes. I want a place of my own, a little corner of the earth to claim and tame, subdue and improve. I want a little kingdom here, and I grieve when I realize that I will not have it, that my children will not have it.

There is no house. There is no land. There are no generational memories to make or keep and no spreading fruit trees by which to mark the seasons. There is no home.

At least, not here.

But on the other side of time and space there is a haven for my homeless heart. “I go to prepare a place for you,” He said, and my heart leaps when I read the words because I am a woman without a place. Those words are a precious promise to someone like me.

Just for a minute, I close my eyes and forget my wanderings, so I can see it. Nestled in among ancient trees is a house built by the Father who desires to be my rest. The staircase is worn smooth by the feet of the One who waits for me, His Bride, to come home, to be home. I think there must be moss on the garden stones and a fire on the hearth and a thousand memories held in by the walls, as if I have been there all along because it was meant for me, all along.

It is home.

All the longings of my earthly shell, every godly dream left unfulfilled, is there perfected and redeemed. Not a single sacrifice or service has gone unnoticed. It is all repaid in glorious abundance and loving detail. Even the waiting breaths, the questioning and tearful prayers, the years of doubts and fears and unrealized dreams—are there restored to me as if none of it was ruined or wasted.

Home. It is a true home from which I can never be uprooted Nothing can steal away the memories I’m storing up there, because all of it, past, present, and future, is built into that place. All of it is part of the story of that place, that home, and I am a piece of it. There will be no good-byes, no pulling away, no awkward beginnings, only—always—belonging.

This hope of heaven, this hope of home, is so glorious that even a small taste of it is better than anything I’ve found on earth. I must believe that if my wanderings leave me longing for heaven and dissatisfied with earth, then let me wander, and let me ache.

For surely, it is better to ache for heaven than to be content with earth.

Surely, it is a gift of God to wander anywhere that leads me closer to home.

In Morning

I am usually the first one up in the morning. Sometimes my husband sneaks out for work while I’m still dreaming, but on the days when there’s a choice, I’m the first one up. In all my years of marriage and mothering, I find that I like it that way, that I am better that way.

There is something about a new day that makes it hard to speak at first, and harder to talk. It’s better if I slip out of bed and into the quiet of the house where I can wrap my fingers around a warm mug and collect the thoughts that have settled in the night without having to respond to the thoughts of others.

I am not sad, or sullen—it’s just that I like to awaken to the miracle that is each new day in silence and solitude. It is my way of being in morning, of greeting the newness of each new day with the quiet acceptance that God has called me to it.

I have been in morning lately, ever since we packed up our house and headed to this new and unfamiliar place. I have been bleary-eyed and silent, not because I am sad, but because this sunrise has stolen the breath right out of me.

There is so much to say—too much, really, and I have found that I could not say any of it, not yet, because it is almost too glorious, this dawn. It is almost too much to take in and too much to speak of and too much to condense down into words.

I feel a bit like a slave-born Israelite, waking up on the first morning on the other side of the sea, surrounded by the plunder of Pharaoh’s and the keen awareness of how a child’s spilled blood set me free. In the night, angels swooped terrible-close and waters bowed before me as if I was a child of a King and the clouds caught fire and led me far from the shrieks of my captors and right into the center of His will, so close to Him, I could almost watch His footprints melt into the sand.

What can you say on a morning like that? What words are sufficient?

It is all too much, all too glorious, all too heavy with the holy because I know He is here. I know He was in the leading because sure as anything this is not what I would have chosen. This is not what I wanted, if I thought about what I wanted without really thinking about how all I really want is to be where He is.

He is here, and there is a bright star hanging over my house each night because this is my stable. This is my Bethlehem. This is where I was meant to find Him.

So I am sitting in the quiet, letting my senses awaken to something that is so rich and full and deep, I can only taste a little of it at a time. It is beautiful, all of it, and different, and it has struck me dumb because it is like seeing another side of my Father, familiar, but completely new, like seeing God in a babe or God in a bush—I have never before seen this kind of beauty, and yet, I know it.

And I know enough to know that this is the kind of thing you take off your shoes for. In this kind of place, it is best if your knees taste dirt and your tongue turns slack. Here is where you wait—silent—while the Spirit does the rushing.

In this quiet place, in my morning, I see that He is here. He is to be found in the great depths of blue sky that swim across the crumbled mountains and in the precious pools of water that gather in the hollows of the desert.

He is here, on this glorious new day, and I am in morning. I am not sad, or sullen. I’m just waking up to His presence in this place. And it is altogether too much for words.

Here

The clouds were horses, kicking up their great feathery tails across the blue sky. I watched those skipping mares as I hung the laundry on the line. Change is coming, they seemed to say. Change is coming.

I felt it.

The sky was warm and comfortable like blue jeans, faded around the edges, and the grass stuck to my feet in little bits because the lawn mower had beaten me to the backyard. All around was the scent of the wash, fresh and clean, and the song of the robin in the trees.

It was hard to believe that tomorrow, it would rain. Tomorrow, things would change.

I looked out at the horizon and thought about all the things I needed to do before it rained. The laundry was only half done. The yard was full of rakes and shovels and the pile of mulch was not much smaller than when I started that day. There was trim to be painted and a shrub to be trimmed and…

…and suddenly, I was so caught up in the change to come that I was no longer here. I was out on the horizon, where the storm clouds mount and gather their arms. I was so far ahead, wrapped up in the change to come, that I could not appreciate the blessing and goodness of this.

This.

Here.

Now.

Change is coming, but it is not here yet. Here is where the blessing is that God has for this day. Here is where my home is, for a little while longer, and here is where my children sleep and my husband smiles and my neighbors call. Here is where God has put me.

Even though I know I am moving on, I am not there yet. I am here. But my temptation is to look so far ahead that I forget that my feet are not where my eyes are. I am not there yet.

I think to myself that this is why God leads me step by step. He knows that if He gave me a larger vision, I would look so far ahead, I would miss everything in between.

He wants me here.

So I dusted off the mixer that has been decluttered to some remote corner of my kitchen cupboards and made cookies when I should have been painting, and I called the kids around to have one when the chocolate chips were still gooey and warm.

“Mom made cookies?” They were incredulous, because Mom has been so far over there that she has completely forgotten about things like homemade cookies and afternoon tea.

Who has the time to make cookies when they’ve got a house to sell?

Not me. Not unless I remember that I’m still here, and sometimes, kids need a mom who makes cookies when she should be painting.

I found a bit of myself in that plate of cookies, and I reeled her back in. This is still where I belong, I thought to myself. Here.

Every few years from now until my husband retires from the chaplaincy, we will move. We will get orders for some new location and suddenly, our home will start to slip away to make way for a new one. The temptation for me will be to slip away with it, to close out chapters before they are complete simply because I know the title of the next one.

I should know better. The best parts of chapters often come at the end, and I don’t want to miss a word.

I don’t want to miss a cookie break with my kids, or a conversation with a dear friend on my faded green couch in the middle of a living room full of chaos. I don’t want to miss the lilacs that bloom in my front yard, or the opportunity to bring them in in great big bunches that fill up my home with spring. I don’t want to miss a quiet evening on the deck with my husband, when the sky becomes a canvas and the colors spill out over the water.

By evening, the laundry was in off the line and the clouds had covered up the sun. My tea flushed and steamed in the rush of cool air, and high in the evergreens, the robin sang his evening song to me.

Things are about to change, he said to me.

I knew it.

But for now, I am here.

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