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"CRAMPED IN A MINIVAN"

DAY SIX

Home is word like "mom." It usually conjures up the warmest of feelings and the best of memories, but is rather hard to define. Is it a place or an experience; multiple places or a series of experiences? Josh set me to thinking about home this week because he said more than once that he wanted to go home, only one time he meant back to Waco and another time he was referring to our vacation cabin. While I was reflecting on the enigma, I read something from a former missionary colleague who has moved to Uganda after living and serving in Kenya more than twenty five years. He writes, "Home! That sounds a bit strange to begin calling Kampala 'home', but it is." He goes on to mention his nervousness over learning a new city and language. For my missionary friend, home is obviously connected to both place and experience.

Later today, we toured the Battlefield of Spotsylvania Courthouse, sight of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. 17,000 men lost their lives in one day in the valley known as the 'Bloody Angle.' As I walked the path of Lee's line, read the monuments, and touched the canons, I couldn't help but think that every blue clad or grey uniformed soldier who fought in that spot one hundred and fifty years ago was likely filled with terror and a longing to go home. For some, home was magnetic north, for others it was magnetic south. But for all of them, home provided a bearing, a sense of knowing that wherever they were they were either going toward or away from home. 

Home is the place we were first and best loved, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to hold on to it or return to it. Blessed is the man or woman who finds it and recognizes it when they do. "Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus" (Frederick Buechner).