Core

I have spent the past two years homesick. Homesick for a place, but also homesick for people. I was homesick for five months as I spent time in France and Lebanon. I was, and still am, homesick for my grandmother and her house in Indiana. I am homesick for something I don’t know how to name: a way of being in the world that is peaceful and slow. I have spent the last few years struggling, wrestling to find myself again. Last night I wept as I cried out to God, “I have lost myself and I don’t know how to get home anymore. I want a home, I want a home, I want a home.” I have only ever wanted a home.

When I was seventeen, I had a dream. I was on a bus, staring out at an orange sky at the moon, and I felt a deep wonder and awe — a longing — for God. It was a beautiful feeling. It named a place inside of me that I had felt since I was a child but had never been able to fill. At the bottom of it all, I wanted God. I wanted to belong to the one who created everything, and I woke up from the dream ready to find him. Indeed, I have spent every moment since then trying to find him. I chased him through people and through relationships, through ministries and missions. I chased him across the world again and again, to Paris and Palestine, the Beqaa Valley and Mafraq. I lived and led out of my gifts; I got an M.Div and pastored and built a program from the ground up at a non-profit. I did all of these things, and never found home.

Here is what I am finding, after all these fifteen years — and what I found when this was my word in 2018. At my core, there is something deeper than myself. It is not about who I was as a child; it is not about self-actualization or a mission statement or endless growth. My core is not something I can find or discover, because at my core is a longing for God. At my core is a need that is outside of myself; a home that I have craved since I was young but never known how to find. At my core is a place where God wants to make himself at home — it is not about me at all, and it never was. I cannot build this home. I cannot sustain it. I cannot even find it, because it’s beyond all of that. My core is far deeper than what I thought.

When I think of that dream I had at 17, I think of where that bus has taken me: to a piece of land carved out along the ocean in myself. The land has been filled and emptied and filled again and emptied. What I build usually does not last, and what I want is never what I seem to actually want. So I wash up on the shore of this land once again, and I sit with my God on the beach, eating breakfast. He no longer tells me what to do or how to be or how to grow. He just looks at me, and smiles. I sit on this beach, and I have given up. Nothing has worked. Nothing has filled my core, has rid me of my anxiety, has dealt with and met that longing I felt all those years ago. I sit with God on this beach, nothing built and nothing growing, nothing happening besides the sound of waves crashing and a brook babbling and God himself cooking breakfast for me. I sit with him, and I weep. I sit with my God, and I don’t have to do anything or be anyone at all. This is my core. I am home.