homebody
On Saturday morning, Kevin makes a sticky note schedule for Adam, then takes a picture of it and sends the picture as a text. Roughly sketched, it says, we will go to the grocery store, and then we will go for a hike. He leaves the actual note pressed on the edge of Adam’s favorite spot in the kitchen, a flag for remembrance. We’ve learned it’s best to ease into things.
Kevin and I smile at each other as he sends the picture, listening for the faint chime on Adam’s phone upstairs, while I stand at the kitchen counter carving a pineapple for breakfast. I make a stack of pineapple skin, rough like tree bark, tiled like turtle shell, on a paper towel, thinking about how I have to carve so much away to I reach the sweet meat.
In a moment, Adam replies to the text.
No.
I can easily imagine how he looks, standing in his room in an awkward flamingo pose, one leg drawn up against the other, his long spine curved to read the message, his head turning back and forth emphatically as he types his response.
Down in the kitchen with me, Kevin laughs, shaking his head, reaching for a hot mat to lift a pan of sizzling bacon from the oven.
Riley’s reaction to this plan had been, of course, opposite.
“Oh, that sounds fun,” she’d said, perched on a stool at the bar watching us, absently using one hand to gather her long, brassy hair into a thick ponytail at the base of her neck.
I press my fingers lightly into the slippery sides of a quartered wedge of pineapple, readying my knife to separate core and flesh, chuckling because, in this, Adam and I understand each other. We share an affection for home. Among the plethora of action verbs available, stay happens to be a particular favorite of mine.
If I could only just stay in one place for a while, that’s what’s usually on my mind as I grab my keys one more time to go, as I get up from my desk and leave the writing behind, even, absurdly, at the very end of the day, long after daylight has faded, when it’s time to go to bed and I haul my body out of my favorite chair where I have only paused to rest a little on the way to sleep. I wrestle with God about the fact that loving Him and loving people requires an awful lot of going.
After breakfast, when the skillet has been dried and stowed away and Kevin tells the kids to put their shoes on, Adam will begin to demand a time for coming home. He will insist that the time for returning is now, to the very minute. Or, in other words, maybe we just shouldn’t leave at all.
Historically, humans have resisted pilgrimage. It’s an echo of a foundational trauma maybe, a pain curled into the memory of our DNA long ago, that first time humanity left home never to return.
In scripture, God is nomadic power, always on the move, designing the tabernacle, His Old Testament tent, for travel. Christ went from place to place, walking miles and miles, teaching and preaching and healing. The Holy Spirit is a wind, a breath, blowing mysteriously. Seeing our need, God runs to meet us, and so, when He tells us to go, He’s only calling us to follow Him.
Migration seems so primitive to human existence that we use countless journeying metaphors to try to understand the nature of life. They are seeds, birthing all our stories, and yet, we feel an undeniable desire to remain.
“Come on, go on a hike with me,” Kevin will say, and Adam will focus on the go and the hike, missing the with me, restlessly tapping the face of his watch with his finger.
Early this morning, I woke up to God telling Jacob in the book of Genesis, “Get up! Go to Bethel and settle there.”
I sipped my coffee, stunned that in one sentence God had commanded Jacob to go and to stay, to settle. Literally, Bethel means, “house of God,” which means that what God said to Jacob was, “Get up! Come stay at my house,” and then, when Jacob and his family arrived at Bethel, God commanded Jacob to be fruitful.
I read and re-read the words, finally realizing it all boils down to this, God sending His people, all the while urging us, come, stay with me. Be fruitful.
At the inception of the kingdom of Israel, God reminded Israel of what had been His desire for humans from creation. Adam and Eve had been the first to abide with God. This morning, my heart lingered on the word settle in Genesis 35, as I recalled that at the start of the new kingdom, Christ’s kingdom, God had built on the same foundation. Before going to the cross, Christ had taught His disciples, “I am the vine and you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing.”
Stay with me. Be fruitful.
Christ would eventually send His disciples out into all the world, but first, He told them to stay in Him.
I saw it then like a vibrant thread, a red cord, woven through scripture, that all human fruitfulness flows forth from our union—our abiding—with our Father in an unbroken relationship. God is my home. Before I go, here is the place He tells me to stay: In Him. Those two words, in him, like two engulfing arms, change everything. I have begun to highlight every variation of them in my Bible—in him, with me, in Christ, with God, like signposts leading me to divine dwelling, to the lingering place I’m longing for, to the context in which all spiritual fruit is not only possible but conceived. In Him, scripture says, we live and move and have our being. To miss those two words is to miss the way entirely.
“Don’t you want to go on a hike with me?” Kevin will finally say, rephrasing the invitation, standing in the doorway of Adam’s room when it’s time to go, and Adam will still resist, because his trouble, like mine, is not that he doesn’t get to stay, but that he wants to stay in the wrong place.
