home.

I've been thinking a lot about the idea of home lately. A decade has brought seven houses in four different states. Home was no longer the permanence contained in any four walls like it seemed to be living my first eighteen years in my parent's home. I have learned in those ten years that just because I possess a key to a door does not mean that comfort, safety or love exist once I cross the threshold. Before even taking off my shoes, each home created a world of it's own. There was the Oakwood apartment where friends laughing upstairs would draw my attention from the fist holes in the hallway wall from one more heated, drunk fight. The sound of Jeff or Jaime writing music in the studio of our Nashville house. The screen door slapping back as you came in off the wrap around porch of the Hampton house. Carl running to meet me as I took of my shoes at "Chenutica Farms". Our first home in Spokane where I was so fogged by Postpartum depression that I don't remember coming or going, or even where the closest light switch to the door was. Now the house on Sinto where I put my keys on the familiar Simon Pure tray but my eyes land on items I no longer consider mine even if I helped pick and pay for them. Each time I packed up boxes to leave one space, I slowly and carefully wrapped up every picture frame, pair of heels and coffee mug as though these things would preserve my identity once the movers had removed the last box and I had scrubbed the last finger prints off the kitchen counters of my current living situation.

In each subsequent house, the basement got fuller as only the most useful items ever found their way into the new rooms. It was never the Hero Design posters, my grammy's crystal juicer, or Porter's baby blankets. Unpacking in the rush of life was always limited to the pots and pans, pillows, and bath towels. Decorative items were bought time and time again instead of dug up from the dank attics. With each passing month, and eventually years, I realized I loved pretty things but that they were truly a nuisance. Home and my identity were not found in possessions or sentimentality. Things created a guilt in me for not caring about them more, misplacing and breaking more than my fair share even though I had put in hours and hours of work to afford them.

If nothing about physical walls and the contents within provided home, only shelter, I had to assume that humans were the real providers of home, of belonging, of rest. But the story of those same ten years held two sets of broken vows. Home became a scary word. It became a place of lies and pain, of false safety, and dashed hope. If the person whose last name you share cannot shelter you from the storm, where do you reside when the world feels unsafe? When grace runs dry and you're forced to look at the truth of the damage done, you find that your heart looks like a home hit by a hurricane. Only the damage is that of trauma to your soul and your mind. Two years ago, in the midst of life-altering trauma, 2,480 miles from my blood family without a home or a partner, I had to question once more what home was.

Will Reagen sings a song, 'Climb", whose lyrics became my anthem.

          "I will climb this mountain with my hands wide open. There's nothing I hold onto."

Life. Love. Security. Depression. Friends. Pain. Stability. Possessions. Home. They all became fluid. Sand running through my hands. I was so longing to find home here on Earth since I first left my parent's house. I had changed locations, partners, careers, habits all the find the one key that would unlock my true home. The reality, the right in front of my face truth, is that I was not made for this place. The longing to find home is natural but the answer to where home exists is supernatural. The moment I learned to hold the things of this world loosely (which happen quiet recently) I started to learn what home, my true North, felt like. 

Home is found in my early morning prayers, still lying in bed. It is found in signing along to worship songs in the car on lunch break with my best friend. It is found taking communion at church with a friend's hand in mine. It is found extending kindness and grace when I least want to. It is found in the deep cries that come with my depression. It is found in being broken but asking one more time for forgiveness. It is found falling asleep wrapped in the arms of my person. It is found in knowing myself better than ever before and loving myself, glaring flaws and all. There are moments of heaven on Earth, moments that are sacred if you take time to notice. That is home to me these days. Not a place or a person but the simple moments of great Love.