Home At Last
That’s the name lettered over the door of the small shop. Home At Last. It makes me laugh. Somewhat bitterly, I’m afraid.
On this day, we are fifteen-years married, and, to celebrate, we wander the streets of this Texas hill-country town, the fruit of our union miles away at Grammie and Granddad’s house.
Sitting down to eat lunch amidst a babbling brook of soft, Texas accents, we talk about home. We may have grown up in this place, but each return only emphasizes how far we’ve fled. We’ve lived away nearly as long as we lived within, and even the memory of Texas as home is fading.
Our waiter asks where we’re from, and I suddenly realize how often we’ve heard this question today. Why? How do they know? Jonathan wrinkles his forehead and says, “Well, we don’t have accents?” Maybe, I say. Then my husband, the one I often imagine to be the less observant in our partnership, states what should have been obvious: “I don’t think we look like Texans. At least not small-town, hill-country Texans.”
My husband sits across from me in skinny cords and a sweater vest, looking unsure, and I laugh because the truth is suddenly so obvious. The men who pass by our window are all dressed as if they’ve just left either a football stadium or a deer blind. They are window shopping with their wives, they are nowhere near a stadium or a deer blind, but they look utterly at home.
Where are we from? We can no longer answer that question. It did take years, but at one time I could say “Chicago” with ease. Now, each time we’re asked, Jonathan says, “We live in Florida,” but we both know that this is not the answer to “where are you from?” or even “where is your home?”
We have a house in Florida, but we only dream about home.
I like to imagine that home is somewhere with snow. The kids tell me it’s a place with room for a dog.
Others tell me that the ache for home is all there is. At least for now. At least on earth.
I don’t believe them.
Home is too good. Too necessary.
We may be souls walking the shadowlands, but these shadows are God-made and God-breathed. The place that feels like home may only be a taste of what’s in store, but it is still good.
And the best part? To find a home is to reach, not an end, but a beginning.
A New Year
This is the view from where I sit on the eve of another year. Not literally, of course, but “literal” has never meant much to me. Literally, the view is more about scattered toys and laundry piles and cough drops (I’m trying and failing to remember a holiday season that didn’t feature some virus or other).
But, the real view, the shaped-by-a-river-of-prayer view? It looks like this: quiet, peaceful, empty, yet hopeful. There is something just over the horizon … I can sense it … almost see it. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I know that it is good.
It’s a far cry from last year’s view. Having moved to Florida only a few months before, having just determined to take a break from university teaching, the future looked blank.
Then, it was emptiness. Now, it is expectation.
What happened in the between? What has brought me from one to the other? The answer, I think, is month after month of not-having and not-doing. Waiting, you might call it, though it often felt more like grieving.
I stopped teaching. I didn’t start serving in our new church. I didn’t make many new friends (though, there are a few – you know who you are!). I didn’t organize or join a church small group. I watched my husband volunteer in the kids’ classrooms while I moved in small circles between house and yard and house and library.
And what am I left with at the end of this year of nothing? A finished manuscript for a memoir, this blog, and many, many new plans and dreams. Dreams that are entirely unrealized yet somehow substantial in their promise and their beauty.
I am living the upside-down values of Jesus’s kingdom. That which looks empty is full. That which has died brings life. Beneath the piles of laundry and the scattered toys, between the crumpled tissues and half-empty medicine bottles, there is water becoming wine.
We may still be living in darkest winter, but I sense the nearness of spring. And, so, I dip my toes in the river and pray the season in. My prayers are merely a welcome for all that God long ago determined to give.
“Ask the Lord for rain in the springtime … He gives showers of rain to all people.”
Zechariah 10:1
Christmas Day
“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”
Merry Christmas, friends.