Driving back into Boston last night, gorgeous orange and purple sunset behind me, red blinking tail-lights ahead of me; the lights of a city that I love sprawling and twinkling ahead of me, 2500 miles of places that I love behind me; a present-tense life and wonderful friends ahead of me, history, stability, comfort, and questions of the future behind me; questions of the future ahead of me, ghosts of the past behind me; the contrasts could be endless... The splinching of my heart and life equally so.
They say that home is where the heart is... but mine seems to be in constant transit...
My friend Beck and I have this conversation fairly often actually, that home is hard concept to define for both of us. It is, fortunately or unfortunately, not geographically defined for either of us. I love Boston deeply, but even still, it does not have the sense of permanence associated with true home. For me, the two places that I feel most at home are in an airport and on campus at U of R, but beyond that, there are many many places that I could call home. And that state of being, while intrinsically a blessing because I can be equally at home anywhere, simultaneously means that I am equally a visitor everywhere. This is the sometimes painful tension that I live in. And the cry of my heart is: where is my home, God?
While I was in NC, my friend Krystal shared one thing that really stood out to me. She was talking about how God did not give the Levites (the Old Testament tribe of priests) a land of their own [Joshua 14:4]. Their homes were to be with the Tabernacle, cared for by the people of the land [origins of the tithe]. This echos then with the New Testament words of Jesus when he reminds his disciples that the Son of Man has no place to lay his head [Luke 9:58], the instructions of Jesus, when he sends his followers out to the towns "without bag or purse or sandals" but depending on the generosity of those they meet [Luke 10] and the parable of the Great Banquet [Luke 14:15-24] in which those with fields, oxen, and family miss the call and the poor, crippled, blind and lame are the ones who respond.
Perhaps I should be a little bit more clear?
I think there is an invitation here for us (for me) as ministers of the gospel to find holiness in homelessness.
In the same way that the Levites had no home, other than with the temple, I think there is a call for us to identify likewise. Rick Warren, bless his heart, gave Urbana 06 a great paradigm for our response to God's call: it cannot be conditional. It has to be wherever, whenever, whatever, God asks. We are not a people called to be bound to a land, a home, or our possessions. In the paraphrased wisdom of Brenda Salter McNeil [Urbana 06]: don't settle in Haran when God calls you to follow him to Canaan.
Our home is with God; our invitation is for the Kingdom, not for Comfortability.
Don't get me wrong: I long for a sense of "home" more than almost anything. This blog post comes from that place of deep yearning. And that yearning has not gone away in the 30 minutes it's taken me to write this post, nor will it in the subsequent 60+ years that I hope to live. But I do think that there is a greater invitation present, to find our true place of home in God not in a "send-the-mail-here" type of place. And I think that invitation is to both those of us who would self-identify as splinched, and those who have a clearly defined sense of "home."
- There is holiness in homelessness for the sake of the Kingdom.
- Don't settle in Haran when God calls you to Canaan.
- Our invitation is for the Kingdom, not for Comfortability.
"For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it." [Matthew 16:25]
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2 comments:
Perhaps it is not the search for home in a physical place. If our true sense of home really comes from our relationship with God, perhaps we no longer search for a home in the physical places we go, but are sent with a mission to make every place we go "home", by welcoming the presence of God in each of those places. We do not search for "home", but "home" searches for us then. Perhaps we are to speak a sense of "home" into even our places of transition.
Daniel-
Good words... very wise and insightful. In that sense, are we ever truly home? Or do we constantly long for and anticipate home (being with God fully). Again, pursuing home or holiness in our anticipation of fully being at home one day!
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