What Does it Mean to Come Home?

I have not ventured into this space for three months, the whole of a summer, the whole of our leaving Texas, arriving in New York, quarantining ourselves for several weeks in our summer rental, closing on a home that seems too good to be true (if sorely neglected fixer-uppers are your thing), spending nearly every waking minute for five weeks making that fixer upper habitable (with the help of a truly too good to be true civil-engineer contractor who just happened to be available for those five weeks), moving, unpacking, settling, and sorting, all while trying to navigate “moving home” during a pandemic. Merely thinking about writing made me feel anxious until the past few days. The best I could do in the form of missives from the transients was keep up with Instagram stories processing the renovation day by day.

“Does it feel like home?” the question is asked on repeat, though what I sense is beneath that question is: Are you going to the same church? Do you have the same friends? Is your relationship with your family great now? Are you who you were ten years ago? “Feeling like home” is a careful way of probing for details most are too polite to ask.

Our oven was delivered a few days ago and a loaner fridge, so the cease of living like we were camping has ushered in a bit more sense of normal. But what does it mean to come home? This is the question I’ve been letting slip past the barriers of bootstraps and determination in my mind’s space. I’ve barely processed what it means to come home to a place I love to the core of my being and yet have so much pain attached to, especially when a lot of that pain wasn’t fully acknowledged by me until more recent years. We sometimes think naming pain will bring some kind of relief, giving it a score of 1-10 will lessen the ache, but the truth is while naming is necessary, it hurts like heck. Most of my pain here is because I misattributed attributes of God to humans, including and mostly myself. Coming home means acknowledging a decade has passed since then and I am not the same person I was then and neither, too, is anyone else. We have to relearn one another.

I no longer believe it is unkind to be honest (though I can certainly be honest in an unkind way). Or it is wrong to be truthful. Or it is most right to be an optimist. Or there is virtue in pretending “God’s got this.” Because, while he does, he didn’t create humans to be mere playthings but to invite us into the play itself, to be fellow creators and participants in the full and messy work of redemption. Trite doesn’t fit in my worldview any longer. I see the one-dimensionalness of my former self here and mostly just feel so sad for her and I do want to cup her face in my hands and tell her God does got this, but I won’t.

I needed to see the world, live in some major cities, marry a divorced man, experience the complexity of racially motivated gun violence, lose one hundred thousand dollars, experience the ache of leaving a church and trying our best to do it well. I needed to stop abusing my body through dieting. I needed to admit I needed more for my anxiety than breathing exercises. I needed to lay in an Emergency Room at midnight on morphine and be told, without question, unless we terminated my pregnancy I would die. I needed to see the look in my husband’s eyes when I said no. And the look in his eyes when I came out of surgery a week later. I needed to grieve. I needed to finally, finally, finally, look at what was hard in my life and say, “This is too hard and I can’t bear it,” because until then I thought the virtuous Christian life was to bear it, the full weight of all of it, to pretend to not need anything or anyone but Christ, and to do it with faith and a smile and words of God’s goodness on my lips.

Coming home, for me, means facing that former version of myself as she was when she left (and perhaps seeing vestiges of her in others) and saying, “No more.” I hold complexity in my hands with equal weight now, the good and the bad, the right and the left, the liberal and the conservative, the faith and the doubt, the joy and the grief, the hope and the heartache. I fight the urge to land or prove or defend or demand.

I hear so many saying how they feel politically homeless this year, and I said the same words myself four years ago, but I don’t feel that way any longer because I don’t believe any human is meant to find themselves completely at home anywhere but in Christ. And coming home for me, while wonderful in a thousand beautiful ways and difficult in a thousand unspoken ways, is just as complex as it ought to be because that is what being human is. I drew harder lines around so many things three, five, ten years ago, labeling them right or wrong, good or bad. But I feel a slight and increasing softness in my soul that only comes not through hardship itself, but through acknowledging hardship and lamenting it with God, alongside God, to weep with the God who weeps. It’s a softness that enables us to welcome the full gamut of complex people and situations and churches and neighbors and politics with grace.

“So, does it feel like coming home?” Yes, but not in the way you may be asking the question. It is not coming home to the same church or same friends or same circles or habits. But it is, in a sense, the continuing journey of coming home to an honesty about myself and in that process, coming home to an honesty with Him.