? H ? O ? M ? E ?

I call so many places "HOME".  I think the word has partially lost its meaning for me from overuse.

When I'm finishing my teaching day in my classroom at RVA, packing up to walk back to our house, the place we eat and sleep, I say, "I'm going home".  

When I pack my suitcases to head to the airport, board a jet and fly 8,000 miles to the USA, I say, "I'm going home".

After I've visited a while, or done whatever I came to the States to do, I pack bags again, head to the airport and fly back to Africa.  Yep.  As I do that, I say, "I'm going home".

Tim and I are in the middle of selling our home, the building in which we ate, slept, educated our children, played, worked and stored a whole slew of things for 16 years.  When I sleep at my parents' home, wake up and prepare to drive there to sort through more boxes, I tell my parents that "I'm going home" to do some packing.

At the end of the packing workday, I tell myself, "I'm too tired to work anymore.  I think I'll go home now." Meaning, "I think I will go to my parents' home, the home where I spent my high school years".

But, none of these places are really my home.

Home implies belonging, permanence, a resting place, a place of total nurture and love and growth.

No home on this earth is really home completely, is it? Our homes here are mere whispers of our final home.  We will finally go home one day, and what a homecoming that will be.

I get excited when I think of it.  And when I think of friends we've made in Rwanda and Kenya who have no real home on this earth -- I think of how special it will be for them to be welcomed HOME at last.

Please be praying for our family, please hold us in your thoughts as we say goodbye to a home that we once naively thought would be ours until we died or entered a nursing home.  Today I smelled one of Tim's rosebushes, and the happy memories of times shared there together came flooding into my mind, one after the other after the other.

Transitions are painful, and this one is no different than the rest.  Adjustments must be made, reality must be faced.  We would gladly trade things for people -- comfort for our call -- but still, I notice my fists are closed, holding onto something, not wanting to say goodbye to a home that was good to us.

The guilt I feel for taking away my children's childhood home (and schoolroom) swells as a weight in my chest, almost like someone is stepping on me just below my throat.  Breathing becomes difficult.

Selling the love seat (which is so old and worn out!  It used to be in Tim's little brother's dorm room, way back in the early 80s!) which I reupholstered twice and which used to sit in our baby nursery, on which I nursed all four of my biological children, where they later came and sat beside me as I read books to them --- it feels like I am ripping off my arm.

Yet why am I complaining?  This was a choice we made.  You can't have your cake and eat it, too.  Holding onto a house we can no longer afford, when a buyer came our way without our even putting it on the market.......this was a gift from God.  And we realize that.  Yet, change is hard.

Lakewood Drive, I will miss you.  Thanks for the memories.


Thank you for reading.