Home

My family is in the process of selling our home, the home all three of my children were born into. I labored here and nursed them through all their newborn days in this bedroom, rocked them and sang to them in this nursery, cleaned up a thousand spills and exuberantly flung Cheerios in this kitchen and countless times chased them round and round the downstairs rooms. It is hard to leave! We have cultivated the berry bushes on our land and worked the soil year after year to improve our vegetable crops. Slowly, through small changes, we have made the house what we needed.

Today, during a quiet moment with my baby, I felt tears begin to overcome me at the thought of parting from a house that holds so many precious, irreplaceable memories. As I started to indulge them, I had a counter thought come to my mind: those memories belong to me, not to the house. Then I asked myself: where is your true home?

This question of the perfect home has come up for my family over and over again as we have gone in search of our new house. Where will we live? What town? What neighborhood? What style home? Every new house has something different wrong with it, a new kind of compromise, a problem, a missing piece. The perfect house seems not just elusive but impossibly expensive! And when I let myself get frustrated about that, I think that I will not ever have the home I most desire.

As I nursed Emmett today, I let myself have a conversation with Love that took me beyond these strong emotions to the comfort found in truth. Where is my true home? Is it ever in a single house? Can it be in a house at all?

There is a sweet chant I like to sing and one line of it is: "For God is my home." God, by whatever name you may use, is truly the perfect home for each of us. When we feel "at home" it is because we recognize the God-qualities in a place--peacefulness, joyfulness, spaciousness, love and ease. Also, when we don't find them, we can "put" them into a place with our own God-qualities. As a matter of fact, when I first moved into the house we live in now (the one I was just crying over leaving), I didn't like it at all. I found it dark and small and outdated and wrong for me. Over the years, we have poured love into our house, we have loved here, and Love is now reflected in this place.

What a comfort to know that the Love that makes a home goes with me wherever I go, and, like those memories, does not belong to a room or a location. No true and great thing does. How turtle like is our place in God, then. We carry our home with us, our home is all around us, a shelter and protection, a refuge and a sanctuary.

Rev. Sam Wilde