Coming Home

Emily and I and the girls just spent a terrific Spring Break week traveling, first to Kansas City, then to Oklahoma, than to Texas, then back North again. We stayed with friends and family and had a great trip full of picnics and pools, UNO games, shared meals, hikes, museums, and lots of shared family time and space. We got everything out of the trip we could have asked for. But when it was time to be done, there was little I wanted more than to be at home. 

As I get older, coming back home after a long absence becomes sweeter and sweeter to me. When my truck finally rolled into the driveway last night and I collapsed on my own couch, I breathed an audible, satisfying sigh. I was home. And what did that mean? That meant sleeping in my own bed, on my own pillows; and that meant at least 4 walls and many stairs between my snoring, coughing, stalling children and myself for that sleep. Being at home meant a remote control that I could actually understand, my loyal lab at my feet, not having to ask where the pill bottles and Q-tips were for my stubbornly infirmed ear, not having to find where I put my soap and shampoo before showering, the couch whose every cushion and corner I know how to manipulate for personally tailored comfort. 

I realized this morning, on our first full day back, that coming home is even more. Coming home is coming back to our home church after two absent weeks. It's friendly faces, a familiar sermon series, a group of people who know our weaknesses and needs and what makes us laugh. It's the comforts of a worldview and the opportunity to be reminded that God is good. Coming home to church is the necessary reminder that we are not God, and that the world does not exist to glorify us. In this case, the familiar is not necessarily more comfortable; it is simply much more satisfying than the weeks spent away.

Coming home is also coming home to Bible reading and to regular prayer. It is easy to get out of a pattern of both away from home. But there is a sense of home, of being exactly where I belong and where I was created to be and what I long to hear when I go back "home" to prayer and Scripture. The familiar words, the commands, the music and poetry, and the sense that all this, this right here, this at home, this all makes sense and will shelter me and be the setting for my life's work.

While we were away, Emily's grandfather passed away. This man became a grandfather to me after the passing of my own grandfather over ten years ago. A beloved, jovial, affectionate man, he brought joy to scores of family and friends in his life. We were able to make it back for his funeral, our last stop before we arrived back at home. For him, after 89 blessed years, he was ultimately called home to Christ. Funerals are always a mix of grief from loss and celebration of life. They are also often colored with the hope of the afterlife. My hope and joy is not that I'll see Chuck again one day, but that he's home, exactly where he was made to be.

In a society desperate to be going places, in so many ways, home is indeed sweet.