Ps. 122:8-9
We're celebrating our home's third anniversary this week (or our home is celebrating three years of sheltering us), so I'm thinking a lot about the meaning of a place, the sense of home that is communicated through creaky floorboards and crooked doorways and ceilings and windows. Or even through a whole town, busy streets and uneven sidewalks and the scent of a meadow or a garden or an ice cream shop. Over the years, many places - mere sets of coordinates - have tacked down threads of my heart, tying me forever to addresses literally across the globe. Perhaps you feel the same. How does a dot on a map become knitted into the fabric of a heart?
 |
| Yes, three years later the hydrangeas were blooming on the same week of June again this year! |
Already, and I'm only 28, I ache for homes lost: the houses of my grandparents, the vacation town we'll probably never visit again, my college campus, the house I called home for three months when I lived overseas, even my childhood home which is still owned by my mom and dad, but seems different to me now. Sometimes when I can't sleep, I walk the halls of these places in my memory, the only revisiting I'll ever have the chance to do. I fall asleep with my body in one home and my mind in another.
This week we spent a day at Cairn University, which was Pete's home for four years of undergraduate college and where he took a week-long grad course this summer. The place was so familiar to him, and even though it wasn't to me, it still evoked a sense of being at home, somewhere safe and restful and comforting. While Pete had class, Henry and I walked along the broad sidewalks (Henry skinned up his knee on the concrete), sat in the shade by the pond, and wandered through empty student lounges. We made the campus our home. It became our haven for the day.
This week I meditated on Psalm 122 which talks about going to Jerusalem and praying for the peace and safety of that city. I had trouble connecting with this sentiment. Israel and Jerusalem don't mean much to me. Am I to take literally the suggestion to "pray for the peace of Jerusalem"? Without debating the place of Israel in God's time-sweeping plan, I think I can safely tune this psalm to sing a slightly different thesis, one I think is also correct. As David prayed for Jerusalem, he longed for safety for God's people, for peace in the place where God resided. Praying for peace and security in the places where God's people live today, seems to fit well with David's desires for Jerusalem. Thinking about homes this week, about the deep connections our hearts forge with specific locations, I'm encouraged to turn that passion into prayer.
At the same time, I'm reminded that this world - and every set of coordinates on it - is not my true home. Though I can fall deeply in love with a house or a street address or a town, it will ultimately leave my heart aching. Maybe I will move away and it will be a place of my past, or maybe it will literally cease to exist - the residence hall being torn down or the donut shop being washed away in a flood. Maybe it will grow into a new identity, one I'm not interested in sharing. Or maybe bad memories will poison the good so that its sweetness melts away. In some way, every place I love will eventually crumble.
Praise the Lord that the new Jerusalem - the place where God has lived forever, lives now, and will someday welcome us to join him - stands forever in unshakable perfection. No bad memories, no cataclysms of weather, no moving sale, no bulldozer can ever change the safety, security, prosperity, and peace of that place. When all the tethers that pin me to the corkboard of this world have been snapped, I'll be bound forever to a far more permanent home.
Grateful this week for:
garden cucumbers
pack n play
art
my Bible journal
honesty among friends
hand-me-down clothes
library books
No comments:
Post a Comment