Exhausted from the time I wake up in the morning until night.  So so tired.  I just want to sleep.  Yet  I lie in this bed, my own bed, and struggle to stay awake. Struggle to keep my mind moving, to keep my thoughts flitting about like summer moths around a porch light, struggling so as not to settle on the one persistent pervasive thought that lingers just below the surface:  This is real;  these last months, these last 12 days really happened.

It has been said that fear is a great motivator.  I agree.  I am busy all day long, motivated by the fear that if I stop moving, even for a minute, I will sink into a quicksand pool of sadness and depression.  So I fill my days with busy work.  Unpacking, organizing.  Arranging and rearranging my environment to look like the home I left, someplace familiar.  It feels like I’m living in a hotel room that I furnished myself.  Like I’m a guest.  A temporary inhabitant.  Like this is where I stay, not where I live.

I sleep in my same bed, sit on my same couch, eat at my same table.  I dry my hands on my same towels, cook meals in my same pots and pans, water my same plants.  Still…Still, this doesn’t feel like my Home.  I’m not comfortable.  How can I be?  I sit on my couch but when I look out the window I don’t know where I am.  My car isn’t in the driveway, my dog isn’t chasing squirrels in the backyard, last year’s Christmas lights aren’t hanging in the tree out front.  And I know that I am not Home.  In my heart I know that I am not Home.

A pilgrim, although often having a religious connotation, is defined as “one who journeys to foreign lands.”  That is what I am.  A pilgrim.  I travelled on faith, hoping to find a sacred place: Home.

People of faith make pilgrimages to places deemed holy.  There is no holy place here.  I did not journey far from my Home to bow and kneel to my God in a new place. My God was at Home and He travelled with me.  Like any good pilgrimage, my journey was difficult.  I did not crawl on hands and knees, did not scale steep mountains or climb ten thousand steps.  But I may as well have.  Instead, I tossed and turned, I wrung my hands.  I cried ten thousand tears.

I haven’t come here to touch a rock, to kiss a wall, to have a vision.  Like the pilgrims who arrived at Plymouth Rock, I have come for a better life.  I have come on the promise that I will find it here.  I have come because I believe that, in answer to a prayer, God laid out this path for me.  And like those early colonists,  I know there will be hardships and heartaches.  There is much work to be done.

“This hill though high I covent ascend;

The difficulty will not me offend;

For I perceive the way of life lies here.

Come, pluck up, heart; let’s neither faint nor fear.”

–Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan 1678

 Still unpacking boxes, trying to “find a home” for our stuff.  Home.  I am wondering if this will ever be Home.

What makes a place Home?  Does physical custody and containment of my stuff in this apartment make this Home?  I think not.  I would say that this is where I am staying (some people actually use the phrase “I stay in X town” when asked where they live).  It doesn’t feel permanent. Doesn’t feel stable.  It’s like the air around a hot grill – wavy and watery, as if everything you see through it is not quite real and could disappear at any moment.

Our culture has many sayings about Home.  “Home is where the heart is.”  “Home is where you make it.”  So far, I haven’t made a home here (I think that takes more than two days), nor is it where my heart is (I think that might take forever).

To me, Home is a concept, an idea.  Like Love, it is impossible to adequately define; words cannot capture its truth.  Home is your history, your memories. It’s a sense of connectedness. It’s a thing you build in a place you choose, a place where you feel grounded, safe, and untouchable. Like in baseball, home plate is what you run for, the point of the game.  Even in the kid’s game of “tag,” there is the notion of “home:”  You run away, but not too far because you need to get back there to be safe;  you run, but you don’t ever want to lose sight of it.  That’s what Home is.  It isn’t so much a “where;”  it’s a “what.”  My Mom always said “You can’t go home again.”  As a child I didn’t understand what this meant.  But I learned.  It means that when you leave a home, you leave Home.  And that Home as you know it, that concept, that essence leaves with you, as a soul leaves a body when the life inside it ends.

By leaving my Home,  I burst the bubble.  I broke the spell.  I can return to that physical place, but it won’t be the same because it is already changed simply by the act of my leaving.  And that act has changed me,  too.  It has taken my breath away. It has numbed my soul.   It has stopped my heart beating.