PJ’s Page –
I’ll be home for Christmas; you can plan on me….
Oh there’s no place like home for the holidays….
Home.
It is a word that carries an enormous amount of weight. For some it evokes warm memories and for others it brings heartache and sadness. Like most things, it’s likely that the idea of home evokes not just one or the other, but that our memories of home are a mixture of happiness and struggle.
This Advent season, we’ll be worshiping, writing, singing, and waiting together in the theme of Coming Home. This theme was inspired largely by our awareness that this holiday season, 59 families are experiencing housing fragility. It may be that they are staying with family or sleeping in their car or staying in a shelter. But we look west from where we worship to see their homes. Still under construction. But getting there.
Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem under similar circumstances. They had no place to rest at night and when the time came, as we recall, for her to be delivered, she did so in a barn, for there was no room in the inn or anywhere else.
I confess to you: I am getting impatient. I want the housing to be completed NOW! Every day I remember these families in my prayers and my heart breaks just a little bit. But looking west I can see homes taking shape, with kitchens and bathrooms and light fixtures and warmth.
I’ve shared before that I’ve moved over thirty times in my life. For me, home, then, is not a structure as much as it is a place where I go to be safe and accepted. It is a place where my heartache can be laid aside or opened up. It is a place where my joys and laughter can burst forth. It can also hold each ordinary moment.
Bruce and I live in a home that we have affectionately named The Magic Farmhouse. I don’t know what it is about this actual structure, but I can tell that it has loved many people well in its 108 years. It reminds me of the best of what home is, this farmhouse in the middle of what’s left of an apple orchard where Shoreline begins and Seattle ends. The irony is, that because of the expansion of the light rail, Shoreline has re-zoned this area and it will become multi-use. The owners of our home will certainly tear it down and turn it into something much more profitable. We will never have the chance to own it.
This has taught us something about home. That when we grasp a physical space too tightly, we are forgetting where our true home exists. It exists in the eyes of our beloveds. It exists in the community we build. It exists in the new things we learn when we pay attention. It exists in the God who created us and who is our true home. It is there, where we are loved, valued, and fully known.
In this season, may you know the peace that comes from the One born in a temporary dwelling, surrounded by animals….and by love.