How to know when you are home

You know you are home when they do not care where you are from. You know it when they accept you, not based on what you can do, how you look, or they way you behave. You know it is home when they can put their arms around you, regardless of how dirty you are on the outside - or on the inside. You know you are home when you find the place everyone else is looking for, the place where it is not all about any one individual's ideas, thoughts, or priorities - but truly, truly, about what is important for them all. When it is about you, but just as much about the one next to you, it is then that you know. Home is when you come in and realize that it is much bigger than you, your worries, problems, dreams, and fears - it dwarfs all the inward thoughts you've had for the past 24 hours. It sweeps you away, picks you up, as if in the arms of God, and carries you along. It transcends the dusty grit of planet earth, that which crusts underneath your fingernails. It sweeps you away. And you are home. Say it. Let it sink through you, through the layers of your conciousness, touching the nerve that lies raw, as if the electricity of spiritual pain lay in a pan of water on the bottom of your heart.

When the face of God, as always, is invisible to the naked eye; the evidence that He truly lives is as evasive as the relationships you are always looking for; and all that is elusive about God takes its form and finds its evidential shape within the cumulative expressions on the faces of the gathering of God's people. You know you are home then. For sure. Because it is the one thing you do not find out there, amidst your hobbies and clubs, gatherings and movements. Aren't you tired of looking there? It has indeed been a long, long time.

Get your feet on the sidewalk and open the chapel doors. Open the eyes of the inner soul as the foyer comes into view, as the music washes over your tired being. Take the fears and inhibitions, the tired longing to belong, and zip them in your pocket for an hour, or more. You'll pick them up now and again, I'm sure. They'll be there waiting back at the door.

But for now, for this moment, go in, and see the gaze of God amidst the eyes of all those people. Why are you afraid of them? They are not God. They are broken like you. Isn't it what you are searching for - someone to share it with? The journey may just begin there, at the alter up front. You will not be on your feet by the time you get up there. It is not very far away. Now get going.