1) There is no place like home. (Thanks Dorothy.)
2) You cannot go back home again. (Thanks Thomas Wolfe.)
As I sit at my writing desk within my newly built home for our first Advent and Christmas, these two truths irritate each other enough that my eyes have leaked tears for the past week.
Anyone else, get weepy at Christmas?
Or am I the only one who tears up when Bing Crosby croons, "I'll Be Home for Christmas"? I cried while writing addresses on my Christmas cards this year. I wept at the stoplight in our new (yet old) town. Water filled my readers so that I could barely see the hymnal as we sang Advent carols while lighting the first lonely candle of Advent.
Truth is that I yearn for home. My tired, hurting spirit thirsts for the familiar, comfortable, and homey safe space with all the people and faces I have known and loved. And been loved in return. Yet, I am aware that heaven has become crowded with more of my 'crew' than it was last year. It was hard to write "deceased" in my address book as I moved through my Christmas card list.
Every Advent I fear that I am becoming more hypersensitive to suffering, pain, dislocation, injustice, perversion, evil, and deep sadness in people, families, relationships, and our world. I weep through the news broadcast. My sensitivity to the atrocities heightens my yearning for "home" almost to a state of panic.
Truth is I cannot go back home. Our relocation to a small growing suburb west of Indianapolis is now the third time I have lived in this community. I can tell you that I am home- but I have not come back home again- because this town and it's people are not the same (and also somewhat the same). Too much has shifted within me and this community (how many cornfields can grow into subdivisions?!) for everything to be exactly what it once was.
Again, it is in this unique season of waiting- preparing- hoping- longing that my spirit attunes to the sense that humans are spiritual creatures and therefore, we are not supposed to go "home again". That simply is nostalgia but not our nature. Instead we are designed for a bigger, broader and higher destination of 'home'.
As my garland tinsel twinkles on this unusual sunny winter morning and my tea simmers next to me, perhaps my tears speak more than any words can express.
My tears tell me that these two truths may irritate one another causing friction and angst. But then, again these truths may also help you and I do the work together within our souls - to focus on who/where/what is our true eternal home...and our deep, deep longing to be there in all fullness.
"As the deer long for the water-brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God.
my soul is athirst for God, athirst for the living God,
when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?
My tears have been my food day and night, while all day long they say to me, "where now is your God?" I pour out my soul when I think on these things,
how I went with the multitude and led them into the house of God.
With the voice of praise and thanksgiving, among those who keep holy-day.
Why are you so full or heaviness, O my soul? and why are you so disquieted within me? Put your trust in God, for I will yet give thanks to him, who is the help of my countenance, and my God." Psalm 42:1-7
Yes, there is no other place quite like home.
Yes, you cannot return home again because you and I are meant for home.
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