Home

Our hearts are restless until they rest in You, O God. – St. Augustine

What images or feelings does this word evoke within you? Perhaps for you home isn’t actually your house or even your childhood house, but perhaps a vacation spot or a friend’s place, maybe a song, maybe another person- a place that feels like home, even if you’ve only been there once or twice.

This tells us something. Home isn’t a physical location per se, it is first and foremost a home for our hearts. It has a home detector, this heart which is our sixth and most powerful sense. The other five senses cannot tell us that there is love, security, peace, beauty, friendship in a place. But our hearts can.

And this sixth sense is so vastly much more accurate than the others, informing me of my true needs and desires, of what is most true about everything I see, of the only things that will ever make me happy, that again, and again, and again…I come home. I place every ounce of trust in my heart, all of my effort to fearlessly follow her, believing with all my might that I am strong enough, small enough, humble enough, to enter the Kingdom, again.

Because every. Single. Time. my brain or past habits trick me into thinking that I’d rather have easy than real, rather have what I want right now or what feels familiar than what I truly need, or that I shouldn’t trust my heart (which is the most ridiculous claim in the universe – and yet, sometimes I fall blindly into the lie), I end up unhappy on some level. Less than alive on some level. Restless, or worse, apathetic. Priorities all out of order. And I remember – this is no way to live my one precious, wild life on this planet, where every moment, reality hinges, breathlessly awaiting my choices. Because my choices, our choices, have consequences. My family will either have love, peace, and abundance in our home – or not. That is up to me to decide. 

Then comes doing the work, the work of following this heart moment by moment, giving every shred of my attention, focus, effort and trust to whatever feels like home in this moment. Because, you see, the only way to go home is to  trust home. When we trust what feels like home moment by moment, home is constructed in our hearts and God can enter and have somewhere to reside. We are indeed temples of the Holy Spirit, but our temples are only as large and strong as we build them to be. We must believe in order to see. Faith comes before sight, just like the blind man healed by Jesus in the Gospels. What is invisible, intangible, and mysterious is actually the most trustworthy in this human existence where we walk a fine line between heaven and earth.

But the REWARD! The peace! The joy! The freedom! The ability to trust ourselves, and to truly, truly trust that God is really gonna take care of us! This, my friends, is the only true peace that exists. I guarantee it. And I am determined to have it.

So when it feels like trusting the true, the good, is ripping bandaid off a wound – let it come off. Let the bitterness heal, let the lies that have masqueraded as you DIE, once and for all! When it feels childlike, foolish! even, and takes more strength than you thought you had, to trust God in the face of whatever you are facing, you can know, with absolute certainty, you are on the right path. 

The degree of your trust in the feeling of home determines God’s ability to fill your soul with His peace, to carry you home effortlessly, as on a cloud. Just imagine trying to care for your own child’s wound if they won’t let you near them. You, try, reason, plead, and beg to offer your child healing balm and comfort – but when they are in a state of panic there is zero reasoning happening there and they are so concerned with protecting the wound that they won’t let you near it. Let that sink in for YOU, for a moment. You and your Daddy. Then just maybe, the next time you find yourself asking, “Where is God in all this pain?” you’ll remember, and lift your gaze from the pain to the One who can heal it.

In the end, we find that the just as much as the Kingdom of Heaven exists within us, so too does home exist within. I had an aha recently, repeating my mantra of “I don’t have a body, I don’t have an ego” (still working on those body image pops!) I realized that in a huge way, that’s actually true. When I die I can’t bring my body or my ego with me, but I sure can bring my heart, the one where God already resides, where His Kingdom is established- Home will just get a whole lot bigger, gone will be the effort and the struggle, and the eyes of my heart will be capable of seeing, and the Temple I have built of holding, the weight of glory I behold.

I just discovered, to my own absolute amazement, that the song I was going to link down here by my friend Jason Mraz, was officially shot at Red Rocks, where I just saw him perform for the first time last September. He has taught me a LOT through his music and this song never fails to wake up my heart.