Descending the hill that defines the valley we live in, my youngest, holding my hand as we walked, flashing me her dimpled smile, looks at me, points to the house in the distance and says, "Will we ever leave Home?"
She is speaking of the place she's lived (except for 11 months after the house fire), since she was 11 months old. It sits in a small valley, surrounded by country. The descriptive that is shared by almost everyone who makes the challenging trek out here is "peaceful." (o.k., that and isolated, but perhaps they go together?). The house itself is becoming a place of beauty. The first floor is totally restored, functional, pleasing and light. The basement is so fundamentally different from what was is amazes me and everyone else who knew it in it's former life.The 2nd floor and attic wait patiently for their potential to be fulfilled. It is happening, bit by bit. they too are light and becoming places of beauty.
Home is a place, for sure and for certain. A physical place. A place to eat and think, read and live, argue, pay bills, deal with hardships, celebrate, live. It is also the place we draw from as we go through life. A place of security and rest. Often, more often than not perhaps, it is a a place to leave in anger and frustration, a place to react against, a place to flee from. Or a place to begrudgingly accept.
The way that she said "home" was more of a name than a place. My profound response was, "What?"
"Will we ever leave Home?" she asks.
"You mean our house?"
"Yes. Home."
"Maybe."
"I don't want to. I want to live at Home forever."
"What if God calls us to move?"
"Then if He does, I will go, but I won't want to. I love Home."
She is speaking of the place she's lived (except for 11 months after the house fire), since she was 11 months old. It sits in a small valley, surrounded by country. The descriptive that is shared by almost everyone who makes the challenging trek out here is "peaceful." (o.k., that and isolated, but perhaps they go together?). The house itself is becoming a place of beauty. The first floor is totally restored, functional, pleasing and light. The basement is so fundamentally different from what was is amazes me and everyone else who knew it in it's former life.The 2nd floor and attic wait patiently for their potential to be fulfilled. It is happening, bit by bit. they too are light and becoming places of beauty.
Home is a place, for sure and for certain. A physical place. A place to eat and think, read and live, argue, pay bills, deal with hardships, celebrate, live. It is also the place we draw from as we go through life. A place of security and rest. Often, more often than not perhaps, it is a a place to leave in anger and frustration, a place to react against, a place to flee from. Or a place to begrudgingly accept.
One of the most seductive promises of Jesus, for me anyway, is the promise of Home. The promise of a place to belong, to be loved and accepted, to be wanted and cherished, to grow in, to have enough, more than enough of what I want, and more importantly, need, that the world is no longer a scary, lonely place, but a place to walk through with confidence.
The promise of Home is seductive, but impossible to achieve in this world. My hopes and promises of Home, those I want to instill in my children, will always fall short, this side of Heaven. And the security that I want to instill in my children, perhaps because I have felt such profound insecurity, is that, at the very least, there is the Promise of Home. It is real. It is, in fact, the real thing.
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