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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).

Finding Your Way Home

How do you find your way home again? It's easier if you ever had a home to begin with. As a boy growing up in Port Arthur, home meant private time in my own bedroom, meal time around the kitchen table, baseball with friends in the backyard, the independence of riding my bike to elementary school, summers playing little league baseball, and, much later, sitting in the high school football stadium stands waiting my turn to walk across the stage and bring closure to the previous 12 years of education. Home was my first car (1965 Rambler), my first date, first job, my first anything and anywhere. In a way, home is anything familiar that causes you to sense that you belong. People provide that, too, in a still more significant way-- mom, dad, sister, best buddy, favorite teacher, childhood nemesis, pastor, coach, next door neighbor. 

What is really odd is that the young spend their time trying to leave home while the old occupy their twilight years trying to find their way back. My favorite song as a teenager was the Haggard classic "Ramblin' Fever," but my favorite tune these days sounds a lot like "There's No Place Like Home." What we're all searching for is a center, a fulcrum on which to fix our equilibrium, but we do not know this. We try to match the emotional attachments of our childhood with things that were never meant to satisfy our God-given longing. It is good theology to insert here that Christ is our Center, but that doesn't tell the whole story. Magnetic north is something you can't see; instead, what you observe is the needle that points that direction. In a similar way, home is our earthly needle - a person or persons that help orientate us toward the Center.  This explains why familial conflict is so destructive -- we lose our bearings because we lose the very thing God intended to point us toward Him. Some never find it again. Some think they do only to discover that what they thought was home is in reality a place where they don't belong or an experience that disappoints. Blessed is the man or woman who experiences the grace of loving and being loved by someone who moves them back toward the Center. Thomas Wolfe was wrong, you can go home again. And when you find your way back, you will discover that home is a person pointing you still further back to Christ.