Home.

Belonging. Sanctuary. Peace. Home cooked meals. Candlelight. Movie nights. Moonlit streets. The perfect paint color. Safety. Love. The outward expression of an inward self.

Missing my mother is an incomparable ache that will never be filled. But missing home…missing home is something else.

It’s odd, for this wanderer to miss something I’ve never really had. The closest thing to family I found in Atlanta with friends that knit themselves right into my heartstrings. The closest thing to love a glimmer of memory even farther back.

The closest to home, a little, rented cottage with original wood floors and wide white trim. A porch meant for summer nights and a fireplace aglow with candlelight. My first book was birthed there. My second degree began there. My call to women’s ministry gifted there. I came into myself in that tiny, two-bedroom space on Mayfield Drive. And I miss it. More than I can say.

I feel like Captain Jack Sparrow when he said,

Wherever we want to go, we go. That’s what a ship is, you know. It’s not just a keel and hull and a deck and sails. That’s what a ship needs. But what a ship is… what the Black Pearl really is… is freedom.

For me, home is more than a kitchen and curtains, and furniture and drapes. Home is wholeness, and beauty, and feeling completely at rest with yourself. Home is comfort and laughter, and unconditional love. Home is knickknacks from trips you’ll never forget, and too many people crowded around a table full of food, and a hug you don’t ever want to be let go from.

Nearly every night I sit in a chair chosen by my mom and look at wall color and curtains, flower arrangements and furniture, and it feels like…an echo. This room was her sanctuary. Her comfort. Where she would hide away and read and forget about the world. Pieces of her life surround me in this place and yet the truth of her, the essence of her, the warmth of her is gone. I miss her. A hug from mom always felt like home. And now all I have is her house, a shell, a shadow of what used to be.

My heart aches with longing to belong and I think of that old song,

This world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. The angels beckon me from Heaven’s open door and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

Moses knew what it meant to feel out-of-place. Nehemiah and Daniel too. And none felt more homesick than Jesus Himself. Separated from His father, His glory, His infinite majesty, wrapped in skin and bone, serving the hungry and broken. Homeless in every sense of the word.

I pray one day I’ll have a place to call my own. I dream daily of decorating, and hosting dinner parties, and raising a little girl to love books and music and Jesus as much as I do.

Maybe it’s silly to crave a dinner served on plates I’ve picked out myself. But I think Jesus understands. He told His disciples He was leaving to prepare a place for them. Jesus knew the importance of coming home. He knew His people were about to leave family and friends and possessions to share the Gospel with a world that would reject them. He knew how painful being an alien in a foreign land could feel. So He promised them a home-coming to look forward to.

I may never have the house I look forward to. And if I do, I may find out it’s not all I dreamed it would be. Dreams can be like that sometimes. But one day I’ll see that City on a Hill and know I belong. And you and I will sit at a banquet table fit for our King and together we will celebrate all He is forever. And that…that will feel like home to me.

Notes:

“Feels like Home” lyrics by Randy Newman. Copyright by Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. 

“Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl Quotes.”Quotes.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2018. Web. 26 Aug. 2018. <https://www.quotes.net/mquote/73451>.

“This World Is Not My Home” lyrics by Mary Reeves Davis. Copyright by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC.