We woke up early because it was the day a semi-truck promised to pull down our street, big and bright and beautiful to two boys who still had a week of being four left in their bodies.  Semi-trucks are always worth getting up early for, especially if they intend to park right in front of your house, close enough to touch.

The kids scrambled out of bed and stood in the empty living room, noses to glass, waiting.

But the truck didn’t come.

They pulled themselves away from the windows long enough to devour cold cereal from four borrowed bowls and a mug.  Then they raced upstairs to put on shorts and t-shirts so they could stand under the hot sun and bake a little on the sidewalk while they waited.  Any second now, it would be here.

But the truck didn’t come.

Jeff packed up the folding table and chairs we’d checked out from the military lending closet at Ft. Bliss and filled the minivan full to bursting with the foam mattresses we had been sleeping on all week.  The kids followed him to the garage, begging to be allowed to use them to slide on down the stairs just once before he took them back.

“Don’t you have a truck to watch for?” he said as he stumbled out the door.  They watched him go and listened for the rumble of eighteen wheels barreling down our street.

But the truck didn’t come. 

Lunch came and went and so did every entertaining activity we could think of to do in an empty house.  A few discarded Matchbox cars spun idly to a stop on the bare floor, wheels to the sky, mimicking the dead June bugs the boys were collecting in the garage.  I bought a necklace I didn’t need online and Jonathan burned pricker bushes with his magnifying glass.  Faith read the same book for the fifth time.

But the truck didn’t come. 

Long into the afternoon we waited, watching the shadows of the neighbors’ houses stretch out across our lawn like lazy cats.

Suddenly, the shrill call of the phone broke the silence.

“How is the move going?” asked the chipper voice of our moving coordinator.  She reeked of happiness, the exclusive kind of happiness that comes from sleeping in one’s own bed the night before.

“Um…they’re not here yet,” came my reply.

“What?”

“They haven’t arrived.  Our stuff hasn’t arrived.”  I let my mind wander to a thought of my beautiful bed, and sighed.

“Oh.  JustasecwhileIchecksomething.”   She rushed to hang up the phone and left me listening to the hum of the dead receiver.

The truck was not going to come.

I knew it even before the moving-coordinator-who-got-to-sleep-in-a-real-bed called me back and told me so.  I knew it, but I could hardly believe it.  It seemed a cruel trick to play on a woman who had been sleeping on 2 inches of foam for days when she wasn’t even camping.

I wanted to cry.  How could I get settled without our stuff? 

I thought back.  Three weeks before, that truck had pulled away from our house, loaded down with all the things we call ours.  Everything we owned was neatly packed in cardboard and bubble wrapped and inventoried so we’d half-know what to do with it when it arrived on the other end of a seventeen hundred mile journey to our new home.

I had stood by a window and watched as the crew slowly drained my house of all its possessions.   I thought of my new house, which was two-dimensional in my mind, flat like a photograph of a place I had seen but never really been.  It was hard to imagine what it would actually be like, and harder to imagine how I would make it feel like I belonged there.

“How do you make a place feel like home?” a friend had asked, but I fumbled at the answer.

“I’m not really sure,” I said.

“Some people like to hang up curtains right away,” she offered, but we looked at my windows, still curtainless after five years in the house, and we both knew that wasn’t my thing.

“I guess I’ll just get unpacked as quickly as I can,” I told her.  “I think once all of our stuff arrives and I get unpacked, it will feel like home.”

But the truck hadn’t come.

And all of the things I had counted on to make a house a home where stuck somewhere between Washington and Texas.

Except six. 

That night, those six people sat around a rickety card table in an empty house and shared a beautiful meal made by a new friend in honor of what we thought would be our moving-in day.   It was a meal the kids declared the best thing they’d ever eaten because my ability to microwave soup and Minute Rice were no match for Mrs. Harvey’s baked spaghetti and homemade bread.

We wrestled the black foam mattresses back up the steps after driving back to the military installation to re-borrow them,  and arranged all five kids in the largest room.  Sleeping on foam mattresses in a great big room is loads of fun when you are not yet old enough to know that sometimes, you wake up and your back hurts.  Giggles erupted down the hallway as Faith recounted our made-up leprechaun stories and Micah declared Paul the winner of his stinky foot contest.

It occurred to me, as I arranged my bones over my borrowed bed, that home is not about the stuff.

It’s about the story.  And all the time I had been waiting for our stuff, the story was already being written.

God has opened up a fresh new page and started writing the words He loves to write:  “In the beginning…”

 It is beautiful to be in the beginning with God, to be nestled into the pages of the story He’s writing for us and to know that we are wanted right where we are.  Any other place on this earth would never feel like home now, whether all of our boxes arrived or not, because God is not writing the story anywhere else.  He is writing it here.

(With the exception of my bed), none of the stuff really matters.  We are here.  We are safe.  We are together.  And we have one grand adventure unfolding right before our eyes.

Home is where the story is written. It is the place where God molds the characters and reveals the plot.  It is where His story becomes our history.

This story, so full of the thoughts and intentions of God, will be told around angel fires long after the stuff has crumbled into dust.

The truck didn’t come.  But the story is off to a great start.