A Sort of Homecoming

Do you feel at home?  What does that word even mean?  Home?  It’s a powerful word, isn’t it—almost mystical.  It conjures up deep feelings, emotions, and memories…  On the one hand, home transcends any particular place.  It’s a feeling, a deep sense of peace with the world and with one’s self.  But those feelings and emotions are so tied up with place and memory.  They are born out of the interactions we’ve had in the places we have called home and the people—loved ones of all kinds—who showed us love and acceptance there.

Home.  It is the house I grew up in, my sisters, Mom and Dad.  It is a special kind of safety and security—the feeling of my mother's arms wrapped around me as a boy, the cool, soft flesh of her arms able to enfold my young body.  It is a place where I knew who I was, or at least didn’t think to question about it.  It is peace, the feeling that everything is in its right place.  It is the town that I grew up in, but it is more.  It is old friends, the Fourth of July parade.  It is the landscape, the river valley that greets me every time I return.  It is the ball fields—where young men willed themselves into existence, forming friendships that they wouldn't understand for years.  It is the streets I've roamed: first on bike, then car, and then again on foot, wandering as an adult and trying to conjure, once again, for only a moment that place called home.

But that is the home of memory.  The town has changed.  The people have left, or grown older, or died.  They have changed and I have changed and home just isn't home any longer.  Yet that memory lives on within in me, is a part of me somehow.  It is a memory that longs to be recaptured or recreated in full, but, like all memories, is no longer accessible.

Yet we try—I try—to find again this place called home.  I want it for myself, and I want to provide it for my wife and our children. I want to give them a sense of home that is so utterly safe and secure and peaceful that they naturally grow and thrive to their absolute fullest potential, and that they never doubt their place in this world.

But the idea of home haunts me. I haven’t felt at home for years.  Not in college or seminary, not in the previous neighborhoods or cities in which we have lived, not in my vocation…  So how can I now as a father provide this elusive, fantastic place?  And yet, when I take the time to look around, I do recognize a new sense of home being born into my life.  I find it in the small pleasures of life.  They hint at and somehow echo that memory of home that lives within me.

Home.  It is the feel of our bed after a weekend away.  It is my wife’s embrace after a long day (or any old time, really).  It is my three-year-old daughter snuggling up to me in the morning, the image of our son coloring at the kitchen table, the sound of our oldest jumping rope in the driveway.  It is screams of laughter ringing down the hall.  It is all the little acts and moments of love that we share each and every day.

And I realize, as I wrestle with this idea, that as much as the home of memory or the idea of home inspires a yearning to create again or build this place of absolute peace called home, that home—home in its purest sense—is not something that we can pursue, but is only received as a gift.  As much as we try, home cannot be sought out, it cannot be remade, it cannot be built.  At the deepest level, the gift of home can only be recognized, appreciated, and simply received.  And I’m finally learning how to do that.  Learning how to still my heart, open my eyes and, like a child receiving his mother’s embrace, simply enjoy the fact that I already do have more than I ever realized of home.  

Photography: St. Peter, MN by Jordan Powers, used under authority of Creative Commons License 3.0

Eyes to See

Don’t you love how kids can just wander in from the backyard or their playroom or wherever and drop these huge questions on you? I mean one minute they are pretending that Batman has teamed up with a dinosaur to take out the evil giant Lalaloopsy queen and the next moment they suddenly appear by your side asking why their friend’s mommy and daddy don’t live together, or why people die, or why some people don’t have enough food to eat or why the Vikings haven’t ever won the Super Bowl. And sometimes we’re ready for these questions. Sometimes we see the opportunity at hand and we meet our children where they are and we ask them questions too and we talk about what is really going on inside those beautiful little minds and hearts.  

But sometimes we’re not ready and we stumble our way through incoherent “answers” that probably leave our little ones wondering how they could have ever risked leaving Batman alone with that scary giant for so long. And then there are those times when we are really not ready--times when although we know the ideas and values that we would like to nurture in our children, we’ve lost sight of them ourselves and we just don’t know what to say. And sometimes, if we’re listening, that is when our children take an unexpected moment in an average day and bust into our world to teach us a thing or two about life and what is actually important...

So our five-year-old son recently barged in on me while I was shaving. He looked up at me, eyes shining, and out of the absolute blue asked, “Daddy, are we rich?” I was not in a good place for this question, but by some act of pure grace, I paused before answering. I even paused before the inner laughter I felt showed itself in any way. I mean, I might have truly laughed in his face. I might have smiled down at my son (condescendingly) and attempted to explain the idea of the middle-class to a five-year-old. I might have pointed out that if Mommy and Daddy were rich we would have a much bigger house. I might have chuckled and made a crack about how we wouldn’t have bought the used pop-up camper but a brand new one. I might have smiled and gently explained how most rich people don’t have to worry about health insurance or how they will ever afford to pay for a decent college education for their children or their next vehicle, or… or… or…  

I might have said all of these things with where my head had been in the preceding hours, days, and even weeks—but luckily I didn’t. Luckily I just stood there dumbfounded long enough to let my son answer his own question. And without me even having the wherewithal to turn the question back to him, our little man somehow gave me the answer that I needed to hear that day. He smiled up at me, suddenly very sure of the answer, and practically shouted, “I think we are rich, Dad! We have a nice house to live in. We have cars to take us to our friends’ houses, and we even have a boat and a camper! Think of all the fun stuff we get to do together.” And with that he spun around and returned to wherever it is that little boys go while I stood there stunned, looking in the mirror, and suddenly awake to the many, many rich blessings in my life—not the least of which is a five-year-old with the eyes to see what I so often take for granted.

Photography: Boy playing photo by Daniel Lobo. Boy's eyes cropped from a photo by latteda.

Images used under authority of Creative Commons 2.0 license.