Garage-sale luggage

This week I had to write a blog post for my Australian Culture class, to be posted on the ASC blog. I chose to do it on the notion of "home." I figured I might as well post it here, too: 
.
 It is often our intent to provide ourselves with definable peace through objective comfort. We think we know what home is, and that we know what home is made of. We think we know how to feel, and how to act, and how to rest in the place we feel we know the best. This is why we often do things like hide behind coffee, eat at McDonald’s, and carry our own pillows with us on airplanes when travelling; trying to relocate the familiar into the unfamiliar.

I speak two languages, but can effectively communicate in neither. Growing up in Brazil, I celebrated American holidays, like Thanksgiving, with things like failed jell-o molds in 100 –degree weather and Christmas with the illusion of Santa coming down a chimney in a city that hasn’t the need for fireplaces. My dad was born in Hawaii before it was a state. My mom is Latvian. I have stuff stored in a cockroach-laden attic in Rio, a church basement in Illinois, garage-sale luggage in Nebraska, a Rubbermaid tub in Washington, and a spare room in South Carolina.

May I venture that, in fact, we do not truly know what home is until we are away from what we once thought home was?

It used to make my blood boil whenever our friends in America would refer to our furloughs in the States as being “Home Assignments.” Who were they to tell my sisters and I where our home was? Who had given them the prerogative to assume America was our home? What did they know of home, beyond their concrete establishment of space and possession? These are, of course, rash reactions from a child’s mind, but I often find myself coming back to the stubborn thoughts. We love to say that “Home is where the heart is,” but how does one come to find where their heart is unless they’ve had it taken out of them? If our heart has always been in the same place, and has been held on to with an iron grip of blind dependency, we live in delusional comfort because we think we have a notion of how dear those things closest to us are.

We don’t. We can’t. We cannot know how dear they are until they are taken away, or moved, or changed.

Oswald Chambers once said, “What is it that blinds me in the ‘my day’? Have I a strange god – not a disgusting monster, but a disposition that rules me? More than once God has brought me face to face with the strange god and I thought I should have to yield, but I did not do it. I got through the crisis by the skin of my teeth and I find myself in the possession of the strange god still; I am blind to the things which belong to my peace.”

We desperately hold on to our notions of comfort. Our ideals for calm. Some of my times feeling most “at home” were when I was furthest from family, furthest from my birthplace … furthest from anything “comfortable.” --- But closest to God, and closest to who I am. An evening spent out in crisp mountain air, escaping from being found in the same place as a roommate who was hiding from the police. The feeling of driving into an awakening sun that makes all things new as you leave behind the foul motel you took harbour in. Sitting down to collect your thoughts when you realize how close you came to losing something, or someone. These things are home. Peace presented by the very presence of God.

Being in Australia, I have come to find that each person in our group, myself included, has arrived with a “disposition that rules me,” as Chambers stated. These dispositions are not disgusting monsters. They are not even necessarily bad. But they rule over us. And now we are brought face to face with these dispositions and given a chance to yield them for the purpose of seeing things clearer than we ever have before. God is presenting an opportunity to experience “home” as we never have felt it before through the offering of peace in a way we’ve never seen it before. We get to have our notions of comfort completely redefined, and our ideals for calm controlled by Him, instead of by the environment we’ve been raised in.

I am sitting in a bed at the house of people I met for the first time only four weeks ago, with trust that they will not poison the meals I am fed or stab me in the night. God has amazing ways of constantly redefining what we see as home. I am living in this peace presented by God’s presence--- and, for me --- He alone is home.