I’ve had a rough few weeks. I don’t mean they were bad, they were more a way for me to group uneventful days in units of seven, than good or bad. Quite honestly, the past few weeks have felt like a waste. If I try to look back over the last month or so, I see empty time staring back at me. I feel like I’m caught in a place I don’t belong. As a senior I already feel like I no longer belong at school, but I feel apart from the seniors too. I feel like the only person not going to college next fall, like I’m a failure. Even at church I feel apart from any form of community. With no one my age, I’m too old or too young. I long for a place to belong, a place to call home.
There’s the old cliche that home is where the heart is, but I’m seriously doubting the validity of that statement. If that is true then my home is in so many locations. Don’t get me wrong I love Raleigh. It’s hot donuts off the machine at Krispy Kreme downtown, it’s culture of putting class on hold to watch a basketball game. There are so many reasons to make a home here. But, my heart is also in the mountains, where I’m surrounded by the raw rugged beauty of creation. I love the feeling of hiking together, refusing to quit, and pushing others to go with you. Even so, I also have a piece of my heart in Nashville, Philly, Caswell, and so many other places. I guess home is then everywhere, but I can only be in one place at a time.
I don’t think home is a fixed place at all. Rather, having a home is being able to rest in the community that surrounds you. Each place I feel at home has one thing in common, and it’s not geography, it’s the people. People are what make a wonderful moment and perfect a place. The joy of Christmas wouldn’t exist without family and friends to share time with. The exhilaration of summer camp would be nothing if not for close friends. My home, is where I’m loved and cared for.
I’m constantly choosing where to make my home. Do I choose the world, watching fruitless days go by, yearning for something more? Or Christ, the one who loved me enough to die for me? Ultimately, there is no comparison between the two. I choose to be at home in the love of Christ. Romantic attraction, physical lust, deep friendship, and even the love of a child by their parents, all fail to even approach the love of Christ.
These past few weeks instead of focusing on how people love me, I’ve remembered how they let me down. I’ve dwelled on the negative, the worst case, the glass half empty, I’ve chosen to live in the darkness of the world, rather than make my home Christ. The Father created me and redeemed me, yet I still reject Him
When I feel like I don’t belong with friends at school, I can trust I belong in Christ’s arms. On the days at church that feel like going for an attendance grade because of the lack of community, I can rest in His word. He causes me abandon my pride, because I am homeless without His love. The past weeks I’ve been forced to rely on Christ more. I fail, and He picks me up because in Him I am strong. I’m exhausted and He gives me rest. I’m nothing He is everything. How easy that is to forget, and how hard that is to do. He has loved me long before I could’ve loved Him in return, He is my home.
[God] having oddly destined these mere animals to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else.
-Screwtape
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
