Home

I write about the idea of "home" a lot. If you read anything I write - from Facebook statuses, to former blogs, to one of my (6?) novellas - you'll notice the common thread. Home. Well, maybe a lot of other common threads, too, but that's one of them. I'm a girl obsessed with getting home.

Last Thursday night I was packing my things, unsure of where I would live when I returned to the city on Monday. I was afraid. Possibly more afraid than I have ever been. I was exhausted and every bone in my body hurt. My body did that cruel thing where it reminds me it will never work the way it is supposed to again, and my stomach swelled in protest to the heavy boxes I'd been moving around all day. I cried. Halfway out of pain, halfway out of terror of sleeping in a cardboard box.

While the pain was legitimate, maybe my fear of homelessness isn't. In actuality, I wouldn't have been homeless. The living situation I'm in has been far from ideal, but my friends have been incredibly kind and generous with their space. That isn't the point, though. The point is that maybe the point isn't that I have a home. Maybe God can use my life better if I were homeless and starving and strapped cardboard to my bleeding feet every morning because they had become too swollen to fit in shoes anymore. Maybe I would understand love better if I knew what it was like to be unloved and unnoticed. And in my life, the sad implication of this idea that God could drastically use a homeless person for His glory is that the past 2 years that I've spent in and out of doctors' offices, adjusting to new medications, afraid of dying, unable to get out of bed some mornings, may very well be how God decided I can best glorify Him.

And I didn't.

A large part of the past two years I've spent shaking my fist at the Heavens and angrily pushing my body to it's limits. I demanded that if God really cared for me He would heal me. Back when I believed that I would make a complete recovery, I asked God for some magical medication that would speed up the process. Instead of that, the next time I went to the doctor I learned that I never would fully recover. And I grieved that. But now, trying to live every day, the fact is that God is sovereign. God allowed my body to break for His glory. God has allowed the past several months of incredible stress, cutting remarks, and failed plans for His glory. Because God's mind is always bigger than my mind, and perhaps what seems bad to me is not really so bad.

Tonight I have no home, I've moved from place to place all week, though with security. And in my relative homelessness, may I glorify God more than ever. For He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Blessed be His name.