Coming Home

Ezra 3:12-13 Many of the older priests, Levites and family heads who had seen the first Temple, when they saw the foundations of this Temple laid wept loudly for joy. People couldn't distinguish the shouting from the weeping.

What does it mean to come home? These Israelites had been in exile in Babylon for over 100 years, and here they were back in Jerusalem, watching the Temple be rebuilt, seeing their life restored. I love that the author notes you couldn't tell the weeping from the shouting. It's all emotional tumult: the joy of return, the pain of all that time away, pain which maybe couldn't even be fully acknowledged until this moment, because to acknowledge it fully would have been to recognize the utter defeat, the despair of being carried off into captivity.

Do we "modern" people have the same sense of home these ancient peoples did? A Jewish friend of mine described a powerful sense of homecoming when she went to Israel -- and I can only imagine what it felt like to Jews emigrating to newly born Israel after the Holocaust, the power of that homecoming. I felt some sense of that when I went to Scotland where my ancestors are from. But I think for me, my sense of my physical home is more malleable, perhaps where I happen to be at any particular time. That powerful sense of belonging which some call home, I experience through my faith, through my relationship with God, who is not confined to any one place.

Still, these days I am experiencing a taste of that physical homecoming. I am clearing my house out of years of accumulated stuff. The backyard, which was inundated and unapproachable for years, is under construction. I can see my walls and walk in my rooms without bumping into things. Relationship changes have led to this new openness, this reclamation project, and since change is fraught I am excited and anxious, joyful and weeping as I find myself coming home.

Prayer: Dear God, I thank you for all the pain and challenges that have led me to this point, and for the new and spacious home that is opening before me. Let it be a place where You dwell in serenity and peace. Amen