Being Homeless

Recently I had the opportunity to return "home" for my brother's ordination. I put home in quotations because it was a very strange homecoming for me. I've returned to Newfoundland before since I left its rocky shores 10 years ago. I've returned for family events and visits; to preach and for meetings, yet for some reason this trip was very, very different. It was strange to travel around St. John's, a city I'd lived in for years, taking in all the changes and new buildings. I took note of the places I remembered that were now boarded up and no longer in use and I realized that St. John's, a city of 102,000 people, felt very small. It no longer buzzed with the energy that I remembered from my childhood. In effect it actually felt small. Not in a geographical sense, but small in a philosophical sense. It was akin to coming home and realizing that your family no longer lived there and not only that, the new owners have changed the layout and colour scheme of your room and house. It was truly a humbling and eye opening experience. I discovered that the land of my birth, the very place that I called home that had defined a portion of my personality for so many years, was no longer my home.
This experience is the closest I think I'll ever come to Jesus encounter in his home town when they asked him to read scripture and explicate it. Their response...grab him and throw him off a Cliff...fortunately which didn't happen. Yet the sense of home no longer being home is very much a part of that story and now it is part of mine. I wonder how upset, angry, frustrated, and/or sad Jesus was when these events happened to him. I know I certainly experienced all of them. It is quite something to realize that you no longer have a home. That you no longer have a place that you can retreat to in times of distress and uncertainty. that there is no place for you that serves as a shelter amidst life's storms.
Of course that isn't really the end of my reflection because I do have a home, it's just a new home. While the one of my youth is gone and I can no longer return to it, a new home has emerged from my journey. This new home is mobile. It isn't rooted in geography or rock, rather it's rooted in family. In the midst of my reflection Victoria commented to me, "you know one of the great things about us is that where ever the four of us are we call it home." That was the message I needed to hear. Where ever the four of us are we call it home. Thus a home rooted in family, rooted in people, cannot be lost and I am privileged to have several families. One is my nuclear family; another is my ministry family at Christ United; another is my vocational family within The United Church of Canada; and another family is comprised of friends.
I still have a home...it's just a mobile home! and I am humbled by the number of people who travel life's road with me.