Coming Home

We can never quite forget the feel and smell of home, even if we have never really felt at home. We still have imagined how it would be. Home sweet home. Home is where the heart is. Childhood memories. Sacred memories. Memories, particular and selective though they may be, help keep us together in the midst of life’s craziness. An image of a home remembered—or if that isn’t possible, at least a home hoped for—keeps us going in the ups and downs of our adult lives. Sunburned and exhausted, we find that the summer vacation, like life itself, finally winds down the road to the place from whence we came. The house from which we were so eager to escape becomes instead the home which we long to return to – a place of security and comfort, a place we know and where we are known. Maybe that is what our lives are really all about—our search for a home where the welcome mat at the front door has our name on it. Not someone else’s, but our own name carefully etched, a special invitation that welcomes the me that is unique into the equality of community that is us.

Perhaps we are all in one way or another, prodigal sons and daughters, good and bad, trying to find
where we belong. Who knows, maybe it is all part of the plan. The fast-track career and the good deal
we negotiated may both just be ways, sometimes even desperate ways, we try to create hope for
ourselves on our life’s journey. Maybe if the deals are good enough, we can somehow come to feel good enough about who we are, not to deal at all and begin to feel at home within ourselves. Of course, it isn’t likely to work that way. Maybe that’s also why it wasn’t until the prodigal son ran out of money and the world’s answers that he was finally able to find his way home. Like him, we have to do two things: Remember the peace and security of the place from whence we came, even it seems mostly like a dream, and act on the faith of that memory. Coming to grips with who we are and what we are about is also part of our coming home. Honest self-appraisal and genuine questioning encourages the compassion and grace that will in the end, guide us homeward.

Adapted from Journey Homeward :Stages Along the Way (Wipf and Stock, 2018)