Winter

"Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home."
~Edith Sitwell

Come Home

A year ago if you asked me where I was going to live for the rest of my life, I would have confidently said New York. This is my home. This is my city. God had other plans.

Two days ago, I packed four and a half years worth of stuff into my uncle's diesel truck with my family and drove back to my home in Tennessee. As we drove away from the city with the skyline peering out at me as if beckoning me not to go, I couldn't help but cry. Not because I would never see New York again, but because I was leaving part of my home in New York.

In the months leading up to my departure from New York, there were so many things that I wanted to do, but more importantly so many people that I wanted to see. So many people I wanted to spend one more hour drinking coffee with, one more chance to hug them or hold their hand, one more chance to hopefully show them the love they had shown me. See for me at the core, home is Jesus and since we are created in His image, I can't help but find home in His greatest creation, each and every one of you.

Home has always been something I have been drawn to, something I have tried to figure out. What about home makes us click. So when I was asked to take part in this Blog Carnival post, I was excited and concerned. I love to write about home, but I also knew that it would come on the end of me leaving a place that I thought would become my permanent home.

When I decided to step down from being on staff at The Gallery Church and pursue my adventures in Australia. I had my plans. The way I wanted things to go. I'm pretty specific when it comes to the details. So when it came time for me to make the decision to go back home to Tennessee, I fought it tooth and nail. It's not that I didn't want to go to TN and be with my family, but that it wasn't the way I had planned it at all. I wasn't ready to leave New York. I definitely wasn't ready to leave my best friend or my roommates or my church family or my Jersey family or my Birds or my neighbors or my hometown friend or the people I hadn't even met yet. I wasn't ready. I thought God was asking me to leave my home. Leave my people.

So for a month now I have been controlling my emotions acting like everything was okay. Not crying in front of people, not letting people see how much I was hurting. See how much my heart was breaking. Then something happened.

I got an email from a very dear father figure in my life talking about his struggles and some of his running thoughts. These were his words,
"As is my morning norm, I spend time in a ShopRite parking lot crying (sometimes literally) out to God, reading His Word, thinking – and even sometimes I think dozing! My recent days have been laden with spiritual battles – some I’ve ignored and lost, some I’ve fought on my own and lost and others I’ve let Him do my fighting while I’ve taken refuge under His wings—and He has won. This morning, while praying, out of ‘nowhere’ but from a gracefully kind Father I began to get this ‘vision’ of The Prodigal Son – Dad and them running towards one another….I felt the Lord encourage me to ‘come home’, ‘come on son, come home. Home is where all is well’. I was surprised…Had I left home without realizing it? Well, it seems that I may have been persuaded to stray a bit and found myself still ‘ in the neighborhood’ but duped and distracted into the mud of worries, anxieties and despair when I could be resting comfortably at home with Dad. I’ve usually thought of the Prodigal son as one who was blind, lost, dead (unsaved). I now see that I can, w/o wanting to, get kidnapped away from home by some real ‘cares of this world’ and I need to return home".

As I read this email, I knew in my heart I was the same as the Prodigal Son. And it was time for me to Come Home. Because as much as I love New York and I love Tennessee and I love all of you, you are my temporary homes showing me glimpses of Jesus who one day I will be able to sit in His presence and be fully at Home.

*This is part of a blog carnival discussing HOME. See thewordsthatcarrythehope.com for additional participants.

In The Silence Call Me Home

Last week, I attended Advance, a conference about the power of God's gift to His people - The Church. There were so many wonderful speakers and so much to take in and even more to digest at the end. I am still working through things I heard and the message God has been speaking to my heart for some time now.

Home has been and is so many things to me. Clinton. New York. Quins. Jersey. MTSU. Gallery Church. Rex, Teena, and Nick. And all of these things are good things. But when we take Good things and make them God things then they become Bad things. They become IDOLS. (Thank you Mark Driscoll for speaking God's Truth and for taking us all to the woodshed.)

The whole conference kept pointing back to Jesus. Everything has been pointing me back to Jesus.

Then last night as I was riding the bus to Jersey to see my lovely Garvin family and I was listening to the Once soundtrack. These lyrics echoed through my trip.

"In the silence call me home" - Jesus, You are my home.

Same Kind of Different As Me

"I'm just messin with you. Even though I'm almost seventy years old, I got a lot to learn, too. I used to spend a lotta time worryin that I was different from other people, even from other homeless folks. Then, after I met Miss Debbie and Mr. Ron, I worried that I was so different from them that we wadn't ever gon' have no kind a' future. But I found out everybody's different - the same kind of different as me. We're all just regular folks walkin down the road God done set in front of us.

The truth about it is, whether we is rich or poor or somethin in between, this earth ain't no final restin place. So in a way, we is all homeless - just workin our way toward home."

~Denver Moore

Wish That I Was On Ol' Rocky Top...

"For time is the longest distance between two places."
Tennessee Williams

Six Word Story...Thank You John Mayer

"Home isn't home without you there."
Les Johnson

"This heart didn't come with instructions."
John Mayer

Who Says You Can't Go Home...

Home is the one place in all this world where hearts are sure of each other. It is the place of confidence. It is the place where we tear off that mask of guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us to wear in self-defense, and where we pour out the unreserved communications of full and confiding hearts. It is the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out without any sensation of awkwardness and without any dread of ridicule.
~Frederick W. Robertson

More on Home...

Home seems to be the one thing that comes up in my life all the time. Yes, of course, the familiar thing of dating and the lack thereof is always a constant too, but this is the one that sends my emotions in a whirlwind every time.

Home is the one place that I always long for. I live in New York. My family lives in Tennessee. There are days and moments when I long to be with the people who know me the best. In the familiar surroundings of neighbors who wave when you walk by or tell your dad if they saw you speeding on your way to work that day.

But Home is also New York. My apartment on the upper, upper, upper west side, as I like to call it. When a day at work is long and drawn out and all I can think about is my hot pink pajama pants and being curled up on the couch in front of the TV watching some reality show. (It's a guilty pleasure)

And if Home is the place I long for the most, then I am longing for my Heavenly home. The place where I truly long to be. Safe from pain and harm, there in the open arms of the one who has always pursued me.

This is something I have been thinking about a lot. As I was riding the subway to work the other morning, drinking my coffee and reading my book, I came along this and it only made Home more desirable.

"And as McCall put it, " I turned to God, thinking he was a fool for wanting me." Which, of course, is the nature of love, isn't it?

It's a wonderful thing when your heart guides you to the very One you need the most. The strange thing about God is that the One we deserve the least is the One we need the most and the One who desires us the most (so much for abandonment issues). At the core of her story, McCall tapped into something that drives us all, although most of us don't want to admit it. There was some meaning behind her madness, going from a Klan rally to a Black Panthers meeting to a gathering at a church in a nightclub.

As she put it, "I was always seeking a place that felt like home. I wanted to feel like I fit in, and I was desperate for it."

I am convinced that all of us are searching for a place called home, a place where we can close our eyes and sleep, a place where there is warmth and we are somehow unafraid, a place where we gather around the fire and the room is filled with laughter and love.

My wife, Kim, has fallen in love with the story of The Notebook. Without giving away the plot, there's one line near the end that captured my attention. When James Garner's character was asked to leave the retirement community where his wife was required to live due to her alzheimer's and go home with his grandchildren, his answer was "Allie is my home."

Later during one of my travels, I had the chance to watch John LeCarre's The Constant Gardener and to my surprise, the entire film culminated with the same theme. This time it was Ralph Fiennes referring to Rachel Weisz, who played his wife. When he lost her, he lost his home.

So many of you have been my home and never even realized it. For that safe place, for that belonging, for that love...I will forever be grateful.

There's No Place Like Home.

"Home is ultimately not about a place to live but about the people with whom you are most fully alive. Home is about love, relationship, community and belonging, and we are all searching for HOME."
~Erwin McManus

my next tattoo will be "home" somewhere on my right arm