The bitter and sweet of Home by Liz Carter, author of Catching Contentment

What does it feel like to unpack – at last – the boxes and settle into making a house a home? Why do we long for Home? Where is Home? And when we’ve found Home, why yet can it still be a place of pain as well as joy? Liz Carter poses these questions and others in her searching contribution to the “There’s No Place Like Home” guest blog series. I’m so grateful for the depth of her thinking and the grace-filled answers she points to. Grab a cuppa and enjoy.

Home is a funny word, isn’t it?

It immediately conjures a variety of images and feelings, all unique to us in our own experience. For me, Home is both sweet and bitter, because I’ve never had a long-term experience of what ‘home’ actually means. My dad was a vicar, and I spent my childhood and teens moving around the country. The longest I’ve lived in one house is five years. I went and married a vicar, too, you see, although he wasn’t a vicar at the time – I thought that there might be a possibility of finally settling somewhere, bringing up a family in a community and getting to know people in that way you can when you are somewhere for a long time. Yet God had other plans.

In some senses, I’m more than OK with this. I find that after a few years in one home, I start getting itchy feet, because I’ve only ever known this somewhat nomadic existence. I don’t really know what it’s like to have that ‘settled’ feeling people talk of, that sense of knowing where home is. I’m hoping very much to know it a little better now my husband is in his first incumbency, and a longer stay is possible. I’m already getting glimpses of what it must be like; of community who know and love one another, who have supported one another for many, many years. It’s an enticing and comforting feeling, dancing in the edges of this ocean of Home, this hope for longevity. It’s also just a little scary, because my life has, in a metaphorical sense, been a life lived out of boxes – and now I’ve finally unpacked them all.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what the word Home means while writing my new book, Catching Contentment (published this week!). Because I’ve always lived out on the edges, struggling to feel like a full part of a place and a community, I’ve wondered what it is like to be inside. I wonder if my search for home is tied to my longing to know and be known, and to be in the place where my soul is at rest. I think we are all seeking this peace which cannot be understood but which can sometimes be glimpsed in captivating impressions of that which our heart is longing for. We’re all searching for that place where we can finally unpack our boxes and be still, be known and be rested. We sense that in this world, we are strangers, living on the edge, and that there is so much more to come.

The writer of Psalm 84 knew this. He was outlawed to the desert, so far from the place his soul called home – the temple. He paints such a poignant picture of longing for that place, of his desperation to be back there, the place his heart rests. His soul ‘yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord.’ (v2) ‘Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere,’ he goes on to say. These lines catch at my soul, because I sense that yearning, too, that ache to be in the presence of the Lord, which is better by far. I live with long-term illness, and spend most of the time severely uncomfortable in my own body, because of the pain and fatigue I experience from day to day. I sometimes dream of how it will one day be, of a place where I will be free, where I will run on beaches and breathe without difficulty. I dream of a home where I will be fully who I am created to be, but it’s more than that. It’s a dream of a home where I am finally in the presence of a God who longs to flood me with all that ‘home’ really is; with all the riches of knowing him, at last, face to face.

I know that one day, I will stand in his presence and I will, at last, be home. But as for now, I am waiting. I am homesick. And yet God doesn’t want us to be wishing away our lives, waiting for our true home, but longs to give us alluring glimpses of that home in the painful present we live in. In that Psalm, the writer talked about the valley of tears, the place he was waiting in as he longed for home. But he didn’t talk about it as something to be put up with or wished away, but as a ‘place of springs’ where the pilgrim will go from strength to strength (v7-9). It’s clear that in his painful present, the writer has discovered something of the riches of who God is, and how God dwells with us in our pain and darkness.

Photo: rawpixel on Unsplash

What is Home, then? Home is where we find ourselves, now, in this moment. Home is where we dig into the treasures of God, and find out who we are and who he is. Home is a place of peace, of rest, even within the depths of despair. And Home is a place of yearning for the Home we know, in our deepest and wildest places, we belong.

Liz Carter is an author and blogger who likes to write about life in all its messy, painful, joyous reality. She likes Cadbury’s and turquoise, in equal measure, and lives in the UK with her husband, a church leader, and two crazy teens.

She is the author of Catching Contentment: How to be Holy Satisfied (IVP), which digs into the lived experience of a life in pain, and what contentment could mean in difficult circumstances. Watch her book trailer here and find her online here.

♥

This post is part of my series on finding home, with many wonderful guest writers; other entries can be found here. It links up to the themes of home that I explore in my book, Finding Myself in Britain: Our Search for Faith, Home and True Identity. Available in the UK from lovely Christian bookshops, or online from Eden and Amazon. Only available Stateside from Amazon.