The Home You Take With You

This morning, I remember my daughter's explanation of "The Warm Welcome" from October.  As I clear the breakfast dishes, refold the green blanket on the couch, plump the pillows, and reposition the bright yellow daffodils in a cobalt blue vase, I tell her I'm orchestrating my own Warm Welcome.

I want to come home to order and beauty. 

In church, I think about the inner landscape of home and the Warm Welcome I have when I respond to God.  As the poet writes in Psalm 90, "Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout the generations."  I come home to that spiritual dwelling place within my own heart where the Holy Spirit waits for me, and I find the kind of peace and sanctuary I need.  I'm home. 

It's not a location.  I carry it with me. 

That means it doesn't matter where I am.  And it means I can offer others a dwelling place they can have with them always, even when they are very far from home. 

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Journal:  What does it mean to be "home"? 

Am I a Husky or a Collie?

I recently walked in the woods with my neighbor and her Siberian Husky.  While other owners let their dogs run free in the woods, she keeps hers tight and close on a strong leash.

"I wish I could let him run free," she says sadly.
 
"Why can't you?"  I ask, watching other dogs bounding off into the distant cluster of pine trees.

"Because Siberian Huskies have a strong urge to run but no homing instinct."

If she let him off the leash, he'd run and run with no regard for traffic or danger.  And he'd never return home. 


Unlike other breeds, the Siberian Husky wants to run away and lacks that inborn, mysterious, and often astounding ability to return home.  Other dogs can find their way back to you even if you drop them off hundreds of miles from home. Tales are told of Collie dogs, for example, who, when adopted into new families, have to be kept inside because their homing instinct is so strong they will return to wherever their previous home is even if it's in a different state.  

Collies have an urge to run, but they always know how to find their way home. 

Let me be more Collie than Husky!  The urge to run--to follow the whims of an adventurous life-- makes me dash off to fulfill that career possibility or that dream.  I'm a Siberian Husky racing off into the wild. 

Praise God for the leash! 

I wonder if when I feel most restrained by my circumstances that it's really the firm hand of God not letting me loose.  He knows I'd run straight into danger with no ability to find my way back.  That tether on my life that I think keeps me down is actually the lifeline that keeps me safe, loved, and home.  


(Photo of Siberian Huskies by Randi Hausken Photos)

Feeling Homesick at Home

Sometimes I feel homesick.  But it's not for any particular home or family.  It's the weirdest feeling.  I'll be sitting there, doing the dishes or folding laundry, and I'll feel that something is horribly wrong.  I'm in the wrong place, and everything feels sad, and I just need to take my husband and children and get home.   

I feel like the wild daisy in A.R. Ammons's poem, "Loss."  He describes a wild daisy "half-wild with loss" who turns "any way the wind does" and lifts up her petals to float off her stem and go.  It's an image of terrible longing. 


What must it feel like to be rooted nowhere, to belong nowhere, and move like that with the chaos of the wind?  Some of us live that way simply because we don't know where to put down roots.  We can't find a sure place to land.  On those days, we are wanderers, and even if we have the strongest physical sense of home and place, we still feel lost at sea. 

There's a homesickness in our soul, even on our best days. 


So I'm doing the dishes, longing for home, and I recall Frederick Beuchner's book by the same title.  Beuchner's writing soothes my soul because he says we are all longing for a spiritual home. The sense of belonging and rightness comes when we put down deep spiritual, not just physical, roots.  

Maybe there's hope for me.  

Beuchner's book, The Longing for Home, reminds me how narrow my ideas of home are.  My home is not my house.  That homesick feeling is a cry for heaven.  


But what do I do with today?  Is there a way to find a home in this day, even though I'm made for another Home? 

Beuchner says this:  

“In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another day just like today, and there will never be another just like it again. Today is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will proceed until the hour of your death. If you were aware of how precious today is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.”  


Today is precious.  So precious I can hardly live through it.   I can find my home in this very day, with God, and belong somewhere while I long for Home.  Living with flair has something to do with finding what's precious even when I'm wandering.