It’s always hard to come home from a retreat. It’s not difficult when you think of how much more comfortable your bed is or when you think of how you miss your shower or your pet. For me I have 2 dogs I miss whenever I’m gone, and if my wife isn’t with me she gets all of my free thought space when I’m not with her. No matter how simple it is to come back from a retreat, it is always hard.
The questions start to overwhelm you on the road home. Questions like where do we go from here, or am I ever going to be the same? What will this mean for me going home? Do I have big decisions to make? Am I prepared for what is to come?
We all have to come home. It’s interesting that we don’t think of home as our true self. If you’d stick with me for just one minute. Sometimes it’s not the coming home part that is difficult but rather the journey to figure out what home meant to us that is difficult. I never regret coming home. I also never regret the journey that makes me miss home. If we’re being really honest with ourselves, though, some of us haven’t been “home” in a long, long time.
Some of us live in a perpetual state of “away”. When I was in high school everyone had AIM instant messenger. You could set an away status because the goal was to never sign out and not have room for your friend to get a hold of you (yes we all had cell phones). So you’d set an away message that said at class, get pumped or abducted by aliens, be back later or doing homework, leave a message. Then you’d be in away status for presumably forever. Some people never came back from “away”. They never clicked back “online”. It was almost a ploy to not have to answer other people’s messages.
I only bring this up because I feel that we get caught up staying in “away” status. What if our version of home is actually the journey to get us to return home? What if the journey home is bringing us closer to home than the home we thought we were retreating from? What if we pursued that journey so we could all “come home”.
Your home was created to be in relationship with God. That home was broken into when sin entered the world and you were driven out. It’s hard to find after years of overgrowth, but if you could peel back the vines and trim the trees, you might just be able to find home. I hope you do.
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Just a musing between my ears. I think I’m finding home is where my heart beats.
leadershape 