coming home

Here we are, home at last, our bags scattered on the floor in the doorway, dropped, like my young adults still discard their backpacks after school.

You know the feeling, or at least I hope you do, what it’s like to come home after you’ve traveled away, when the touch of other places still clings to your cheeks and the road noise still echoes in your ears, and finally, you walk into what you know.  And I mean know, not informationally down to the serial numbers and brands and quantities of supplies, but so familiarly that you’d recognize a change in the quality of the light.  You know the smell of home, the sound of home, the feel of your only-around-the-house clothes against your skin, the crisp-cool touch of the sheets on the bed when you first slide in at night.

I do hope you have a place where you feel at home.  If you do, I imagine you’re experiencing it right now in your body, even if you’re at work or on vacation and not sitting in the corner of your couch or on the porch or wherever you most like to be when you return to your rest, because, as Dorothy’s old saying goes, there’s no place like home.

Coming home, making home, these intentions are not just about location but posture, not just about knowledge but knowing, not just about moving in but deciding to stay and to live.

I always think of this the moment I return home and put everything down, and I’m not just talking about my suitcase.  The moment I sigh and suddenly become the most honest me, peeling off my socks and stowing away my shoes.  As a kid, I always wondered why Mr. Rogers walked through the front door and immediately exchanged his jacket for a cardigan, his dress shoes for his tennis shoes, but as an adult, I understand completely.  Home has its own wardrobe, soft and lived-in and plainly essential.  I change my clothes when I get home too, because this is the place where I feel no need to hide the shadows of cooking oil on my t-shirts, where I don’t think about whether my toenail polish looks irreparably chipped, where I don’t wonder where or how to sit or what to say.

I have a dear sister-friend who always thinks to pray for our home, sitting on my sofa with her leg dangling over the side, always asks God to make it our safe place, a refuge, a place of love and warmth, and every time she words that prayer, I whisper my gratitude, remembering when my children were small and I’d often prayer walk our house.  I would stand in their rooms and invite God to inhabit those spaces with them, would ask Him to let His presence be felt in tangible ways, to chase away any evil and reveal any hidden things that needed to come out into the open.  God has always answered our prayers for home, has always created a home for us, has always lived right here with us.

I think that’s what Josh really feels now, that Peace, that abiding of God, as we all step through the door, and Josh walks toward the room where he sleeps when he’s here, calling over his shoulder, his voice a smile, “Well, you know this is my second home.”  It’s gratitude he’s wording, because to have not one home but two, well, that’s a wow-compelling grace.  I feel that too, and have, ever since God invited me to make my home in Him.  Even un-homed, I can be at home.  Even working away from home, I can work from home.

“Yes, this is your home, too,” Riley says, her voice soaring wide.  “Of course it is, Josh.”

In his wonderful, every-Jesus-person-should-read-this book Practicing the Way, John Mark Comer succinctly writes the invitation of Jesus this way:  Make your home in my Presence by the Spirit, and never leave (37).  In so doing, Comer amplifies what Jesus says in the gospel of John:  Remain in me, as I also remain in you.  There’s this longing moving through the Word of God, that is, through Christ, for all of the Father’s degenerate children to bring our brokenness and rebellion, our weariness and heavy loads, back home to Him, a clear sense, in fact, that He waits for that, goes out looking for us, runs toward us even when it’s an indignity to Him, as only a perfectly loving Father could.

The minute my bare feet hit the cool vinyl plank floors of home and I look around at the faintly iridescent gray on the walls and feel soothed, the minute I land in my favorite bend of the couch and lean an open book against my knees, thinking somewhere deep, I’m home, thanks overflows to more and more thanks that our wise God uses home to help me understand the kind of intimacy with Him that’s really on offer.  He wants to be the place I always return to for rest, the place where I lay everything down and become the most honest version of myself, the place where I don’t ever feel awkward.  He wants me to know Him by feel, by the quality of His light, by intimate experience, and not just as information catalogued in my mind.  He isn’t a law to keep or a set of traditions or some kind of program or attractional strategy but a force of Love so vast and ineffable as to permeate every seen and unseen space, to blow my mind, and to house my soul.  He is, as Paul taught, the one in whom [I] live and move and have [my] being, close enough to be found, even as I am found in Him.

I have, with these things in mind, lately been practicing intentional returns, coming home again to Jesus for rest, but as I go—in the car on the way to school, when I leave to meet a friend, as I enter other spaces, and in this way, I’ve been learning again to pray without ceasing.  I’ve been waking up to the ever-presence of God and letting Him be my refuge, sinking in, wearing Him as my lived-in clothes, and it’s cultivating a kind of contented, open-hearted joy in me that I can only describe in the context of home.

Riley slowly descends the stairs, and, since Josh is still preoccupied in his room, she wanders over to the other end of the couch and lays herself down, cheek pressed, palms flat and open, knees bent.  She closes her eyes, and I smile, because her posture for rest always makes me think of the way scripture describes the behavior of those in reverent awe of God, those aware of how much they need His grace, how they fall on their faces.

“It’s good to be home,” she says, half into the couch, and I readily agree, yes, yes it always is, thinking of the way Eugune Petersen paraphrased a snatch of a Psalm. I’m in the Presence of God—oh how refreshing it is!  I’ve made the Lord God my home.

“You know, we’re home now, Rilo,” Josh says, suddenly flooding the room with his voice and his affection, love embodied, walking in to sit right beside her, and she rises, waking again to his presence, shifting her body to lean into him as she entwines her fingers, her life, with his.