my home is with you

Wednesday afternoon, I stepped off a stuffy Frontier airbus onto an icy-cold jetway and sucked in a breath of frigid Denver air.

I don't like layovers. I don't like being set free from one claustrophobic airborne prison knowing that I can't get home without getting inside another. I don't like the feeling of being in-between, halfway there or halfway gone; I don't like sinking down into a lonely corner in tears, feeling lost, feeling that I'm being ripped limb from limb between one home and another, enveloped in a homesickness that spans continents.

This, I suppose, is the price of being loved and loving much; of leaving what's familiar to risk knowing something new.

This is the life I entered into when I followed my God to Florida four years ago. It's the life of a perpetual layover, of never feeling quite complete wherever I am; of submitting, for the rest of my life, to the reality of an emptiness inside me, "an indescribable longing of the heart for I know not what." I have called it discontentment before, and maybe that's a piece of it; but more and more I find it is not a dissatisfaction with my lot that leaves me so conflicted, but a sense of having known what it is to leave everything behind in order to step forward with God, and to return all the richer for having done so - what it is to "taste and see that the LORD is good" and then find myself with an unquenchable thirst for more of Him.

Going back to Florida is like going home, like going back to Bethel - to the place where God led me, the place where I called upon His Name, the place He proved Himself faithful. I walk down the hallway of my old dorm and I sit in the classroom where I spent so many hours studying and my soul is refreshed with reminders that God is good, that He is with me - and that "home" is not quite so easily defined anymore.

I go to Florida and I am homesick. I return to Washington and I'm homesick. It doesn't seem to matter where I am; I'm still aching a little, feeling stuck in between.

This is more than a lonely layover between two cities on a map; it's the tense balance of having an earthly life and an heavenly destiny, of living as an eternal soul in a mortal body, of being halfway there and halfway gone in that uncomfortable "almost home" state - of walking hand in hand with God through the thrilling as well as the mundane and saying, "Wherever I am, my home is with You."

If I could choose exactly the way I want to be remembered for my brief appearance in history, I would plagiarize the epitaph of Enoch: "Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him" (Genesis 5:24).

Enoch lived in-between, almost-home, hand-in-hand with God - until God led him directly across the threshold into His kingdom.

May they say the same of me: Hallie walked with God, homesick for His presence, until He led her into eternity.

Wherever I am, my home is with You.