Home

The past few months have found me living the statement of HOME. Yes, there’s a period at the end, no question mark as to where it is or ought to be. The word conjures up so many sights, sounds, and smells- different for all of us. But whether a physical location or moment in time, HOME is where we belong, where we are meant to be, where we live our truest self. Yet sometimes, home is more than a place we find ourselves, rather it is a place that finds us.

For me it began like this, HOME…??...!!!...??? Picking up all over again thousands of miles away left me questioning and searching for a physical location that was home. My question for God was where do you want me? Stubbornly, I kept asking the same question, even probing further with Why?? Yet there was no answer. I wasn’t asking the right question.

What is HOME? To be fair, I didn’t really ask this. Instead, I sighed, I moved on, and prayed just to be. And in that I was shown HOME. A perfect 46 degree night in January led my feet out to the lit monuments on the National Mall. Starting at the Washington and making my way down towards Lincoln, across to MLK and FDR, and around to Jefferson, I run thankful for ear warmers and gloves. Hard breathing and sweat against the cool night air calm me and I wander; knowing I belong just as the geese lying on the ice sheets that cover the Tidal Basin do. Slats in a fence barely wide enough to peer through with one eye give view to a white sandy beach, the ocean haze, and in the distance the downtown buildings of San Diego. A step back affords perspective of the U.S. Mexico Border; a construction meant to separate, yet in its resistance can unite the most unlikely of hearts. This is home, in the Borderlands of ambiguity, among those who intimately experience God in hardship and suffering as well as in celebration and joy and invite me to enter into this as well. With feet wet from tide-pooling, growing cold from the loss of the sun as it slowly sinks into the grey-blue of the water, I gaze towards the painted sky over the ocean and give praise for the adventure of it all- known and unknown. It is home. Wine and chocolate chip cookies that raise hard, belly snorting giggles around the table and the waving hands and smiles of strangers on morning runs bring me home to a church whose walls happen to be hands and feet, and laughter too.

HOME is not a place outside of one’s self, it dwells within. “I do not know much about grace, but I do know this: Grace meets us where we are at and never leaves us quite how she found us.” Let Grace come.