The Jerusalem Experiment

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of home, a reality that seems to transcend any specific location. Home functions as a resting point for our souls. Home is a refuge. And while many of us envision a specific residence when we are asked where home is for us, home is home because it is place  we have been invited into and granted permission to simply be.

Home has always been a difficult concept for me to understand. From as early as I can remember, home has been a divisive word. Beginning at age five and until I was able to drive, I vacillated between two very different realities of home. Every two weeks I made the move from my mom’s to my dad’s–gathering up my clothes, toys, school supplies and journeying to a very different environment. Because these environments (my mom’s and my dad’s)  were so drastically different, I never really felt adjusted, and so home, for me, was never really a clearly defined concept. I was always on the move. I was always trying to figure out what it meant to rest in the arms of home.

When left for college, I found myself surrounded by peers who were each seeking to achieve individual goals in order to materialize private ambitions. College was largely an individual endeavor before it was ever an experiment in authentic community, and to be honest, I got wrapped up the temptations to define myself through my own, personal success.

Home, as I’ve slowly begun to realize, has very little to do with locale–though contexts can serve as means through which we are allured into a homecoming–but, rather, home is the heart’s receptive posture towards the reality of incarnation. When we still ourselves under the weight of the reality of God, we find (if we are both brave and honest) that on the other side of our pain is the startling reality of the God’s nearness.

It was unlikely that God should be born in the backwards village of Bethlehem. Shouldn’t the revelation of God’s heart be made manifest in the center of the holy city, Jerusalem? Shouldn’t God’s reality be exemplified through our best efforts at obedience?

Yet, in the dead of night the zeal of God pulled together the chasm separating the agony of the human condition and the unfailing love of YHWH. Jesus has come into the very places of death and confusion in our lives in order to raise up the worst of us. In the places where we have surrendered to our fears of homelessness, God has prepared for us a place in the very center of His love.

Throughout the Psalms, the bleeding-hearted poets call God “a refuge.” A refuge is a safe place to run when the jaws of despair snap at our ankles. A refuge is a place of rest, a reality that shifts our perspective, where we are welcomed to exchange our identities as vagabonds and nomads for true daughter and sonship.

Home can be a paradoxical reality because for so many of us the very word “home” conjures up images of strife, violence, addiction, loneliness, rejection and the like; yet, if we’re honest and we listen, we’ll quickly come to the realization that the mystery of “home” is at the core of what souls long for. We yearn for home when we are pierced by a deep sense of loneliness. We move from relationship to relationship, from activity to activity on a frantic search for home. But home will never be found in our striving nor will it ever be built by our hands, for,

Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. God settles the solitary in a home… (Psalm 68:5-6a).

No matter what portrait our experiences of “home” paint, the reality of the place our hearts long for is constructed within the center of God’s heart, and this is the place His love beacons us to enter with thanksgiving and praise. Welcome home.