Being At Home and Adrift

February 8, 2023

Beloved:  
          On our walk around the neighborhood this morning, Birdy turned into our driveway on her own.  She knows her way home now, which is no small thing to know.  When I finished college and wasn’t sure my parents would be cool having me back while I attended seminary, my mom said, “Your home is wherever I am,” and they bought me a desk.*  Two years later I got married; thirty-four years went by and life has changed again.  I can find the driveway on my own but I am completely adrift.  Everything but my books and sewing things are unpacked.  My body eats and sleeps here, but my heart and mind are feral and skittish, always giving the slip to this new reality, lest I lose something that I suspect is already lost.
          I know what my mother meant, but I’m not sure she knew all she said.  None of us is completely at home here, however much we may trust this world to do right by us all our lives.  But our life in the God, the Creator, the One who holds all things together, is holding us, always and in this moment.  We are at home in that Belovedness, however adrift we feel in this world, and in our own troubles.  For me there is much practice involved in re-membering myself to this reality, in rooting myself in this truth which tells me where my home is, which driveway is mine, if you will.  I must sleep.  I must journal.  I must pray.  I must walk.  And most of all – I must assume in my deepest self that God has got this situation in hand, because I most certainly do not.  My situation is not peculiar to human experience.  People everywhere are suffering and/or struggling, doing our best when our best is not nearly enough to get by.  And yet, somehow we are.  With the smallest of means and the help of good friends, somehow we get by and better.  We believe in spite of any cause to give up.  Don’t give up.  And I won’t either.  We will push and we will hold fast and one day we will know what we cannot possibly see now – that God was in this with us all along.  And then we shall rejoice.

~ peace & prayers, 
pastor annette

*My parents lived in Louisville Kentucky, where I also went to seminary at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.