No Place Like Homes

If "home " is a place where I feel utterly welcomed and unconditionally accepted, if it's where I can be myself in the mutuality of loving respect, if there is safety and joy and deep delight, then it ocurs to me that I am several times blessed. 

I have a home in Highview, the community of faith that has graciously allowed me to serve with them since the beginning.   I truly enjoy visiting other churches, large and small, but ultimately I know my home is with the beautiful, transforming souls I call family. 

I have a home halfway around the world!   Hot Springs, just east of Chiang Mai, is quite remarkably no longer strange to me.  Quite the opposite.   The heat, the food, the bugs (and sometimes bugs for food! ) the language, the faces - oh those faces! - all seem so familiar to me now that I step off the plane and relax into myself so deeply my heart knows without question that I'm home. 

I have a home with Ken.  This goes without saying.   I love the easy way of being together that only a long love knows.  Wherever Ken and I are together, that is home to me.  I love our empty nest, and how our kids have kids of their own and that for the most part I think they all like me! I love the home of being Gramma! 

I have a home here by the water.  It's a humble dwelling by real estate standards.  But it is a palace of blessing to me.  A refuge from the demands the world would place on me, and the demands I place on myself.  Here I am at home with loon and fox and turtle, with jenny wren and chipmunk and heron.  The quiet walls us round to shut out the insanity.  I am stilled by the water, sky and rock.  I am me. 

Yet there is one Ultimate Dwelling that makes possible this sense of so many homes. 

Psalm 91:1 He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High wiĺl rest in the shadow of the Almighty. 

Two summers ago when I was terrified and exhausted from dealing with what I perceived to be a threat to something highly treasured, this psalm became my home-mantra.  My mind and heart locked on to the concept of God-as-Home in a new and transformative way.   

Since then I have known a deeper experience of home, and it has less and less to do with space.   And while I will likely always connect to some form of sacredness of space, the truth is that my spirit is perpetually at Home. 

My time at this home, the one by the water, is just beginning.   I feel I am being invited to rest and just be, to cease striving and simply know that He is God.  

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