What’s great about a vacation house is it’s easy, it’s exciting, it’s refreshing. You leave sandy footprints on the porch and grab blueberries on your way out the door, and you stay up and sleep in. You have snapshots of beaches, and landmarks, and exciting adventures. You see yourself in a new light for those moments, for that week, that month, maybe even that year. You see things beautifully and you laugh a lot more. Vacation is beautifully relaxing, but at the end of your time, you always are happy to be home. You take a deep breath in of realization that you have missed your house, your home, your humble abode of comfort. The walls are lined with pictures that show the years that have passed and the moments that might have just happened. Your walls are painted colors you picked out with reasons and ideas behind each stroke. Your bed is a safe haven, a place for reading, and praying, and breakfast in bed, and deep conversations. Your living room is a place of writing, and laying, and idle chatter with friends over wine. The kitchen holds laughter, and faith filled hunger, and love, and excitement, and full stomachs.
I’d rather have a home than a vacation house.
I want to feel accepted, loved, and comfortable and I want that to be constant.
I don’t just want that for a week, or a month, I want it forever.
My whole life I've treated God’s love like a vacation house, and I didn’t even realize this until the other day, when yet again, I wasn’t feeling loved or accepted, or comfortable. I realized I don’t accept love, I need to earn it. I go to God’s love when I need a break or feel worn out and broken. I don’t go to His love like a home, I go to His love like a vacation house. I need to unpack and move into this house that is supposed to be a home. A house that has many rooms, a room for me.
My friend Hannah said to me tonight;
“I wish and pray that you can feel the love the way you love people. Big. You love really big. I think if you could catch a glimpse of that it would be over for you. You’d be totally wrecked.”
The good thing about friends is that they see things in you that you don’t ever see and they tell you. You may not believe them, like me, but for them, It is truth, and it’s truth seen with The Fathers eyes. Your friends don’t have the same critical, mean, unloving gaze as you do. When they look at you, The Father gives them His eyes, and His grace, and His love and they see you in a light that you are blinded from.
“We either live our life as if we have a home, or we live our life as if we don’t have a home. We either live our life feeling safe, secure and at rest in The Fathers heart, experiencing His love and giving it away, or we live our life with apprehension and uncertainty, struggling constantly with fear of trusting, the fear of rejection, and the fear of opening up our heart to love.” Jack Frost- Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship
I don’t want to see myself in a new light for a week, or a month, or even for a year. I want to see myself through a light that is eternal, a light that is beautiful, gracious, loving and true. The love of God is not a love that is forced. As children we believe that our parents love us because well, they’re our parents and that is what they do. But God isn't saying he loves us because he has to, he’s saying he loves us because it’s true, and that acceptance, and that peace, and that grace is enough to satisfy a soul eternally.
I know I have to move in, I know I have to learn to be loved without cause, without merit, without a medal. I know my bags have to be emptied and my cupboards need to be full. My life will eventually be settled into a home, into a trust, into a grace that for so long I believed needed to be earned, even when I was told otherwise. It won’t happen over night, I'll have to sell that old vacation house, and allow my heart to transform into flesh, moldable flesh, but it will happen. The house with many rooms is mine and It’s waiting, the love that is unchangeable, forgiving, and all powerful is there waiting. God is in the Kitchen pouring us some red wine, and I'm sure there is homemade pizza on the table, once I walk through the front door, once I sit down at the kitchen table and allow myself to open up to this new found relationship over pizza and wine, my heart will be new, and there is no turning back.
I’m home.
“And i heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”
-Revelation 21:3
