Divine Plagiarism

It is not really fair, I am realizing, to resent someone for failing to provide something that they were never capable of providing in the first place. Even if they did promise it. I am beginning to understand the depths of bitterness in my own heart. Remarkably, I am finding much of my driven-ness wrapped around that bitterness. Alexander goes to Asia to find his home. Finding none, he drives harder and further. When counseled to return to Macedonia, he unleashes his rage on those who advise him to return ‘home.’ These men truly consider themselves to have a home. He does not. For them to ask him to return to a place named home is an invitation to a mockery.

‘We’re all the home that’s offered here.’ As much as I hate to quote a Sarah McLachlan song, it seems to fit. There was something deep, something that was never at peace with the campus ministry I was involved during grad school. I think I have finally found words to wrap around it. There has always been a sense somewhere of the accusation ‘we all fit, why can’t you?’ Like there was some set of rules in a given place, and others knew them instinctively. Not just that. There was a perception of a sense of belonging, a sense others had that I could not really ever find. Like they had finally found what they were looking for. Like they were home.

There was always a mad passion in my journey. One that told me in every new place that I haven’t quite found the object of my search, one that pushed me over the every next mountain range to find it. (I know that I’m supposed to like Bono, being a young, socially conscious, IV-trained Christian and all, but I really couldn’t bring myself to say ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.’ Oops. I guess I just did.)
That search drove me to my undergraduate institution (emphasis on institution,) to grad school, to pilot training, and to my current job. Don’t get me wrong, I do not regret any of those things. They are all tremendous blessings and God used those places to shape who I am in Him. But it’s hard to understand a quest when you never quite understood the question.

There is something about humanity that causes our heart and our head to constantly miscommunicate. Our hearts drive us on, and we think we know what it wants. We try to get that thing, but our heart rejects it. Perhaps this is why we always want what we can’t have. A part of us believes that the answer to that driving question must be in that place that is just beyond our reach. After all, we have found that it is not in any of the things within reach. The author of Ecclesiastes can tell us that much. But he is no Gautama. He does not tell us to give up on desire. Lewis tells us that desire will lead us home, if we follow it where it leads. He is right, both about the journey and its object. Home is what we really want.

There is no home to be found here. There was once a home here, once. We chose exile, and exiles we have been ever since. But we are still royalty in exile. We were meant for so much more, and our heart remembers. Hope is a hard place, though. Comfort and desire rarely co-exist. To want at all is to sacrifice safety and stability. You must move in order to find the object of your desire, and very often, to move is to fail or to get hurt. But the alternative is worse. Consider Eldridge’s beached sea lion, making his home in a mud hole. We can end the exile by setting here, but if we are exiled royalty, we end our claim to royalty when we end our exile.

Refugee camps are as good as it gets on this side of eternity. We sojourn with others on their way home. The camps are not home, but they are very different from the slums we built in the wasteland. While without many of the amenities of those slums, the camps are populated by those who will populate the Heavenly city. But we aren’t there yet.

Sometimes you get frustrated with each other in the refugee camps. Tent flaps do little to keep out the snoring coming from the next tent. You get annoyed with the people in line for the latrine. You may not all even see eye to eye on which direction move the camp. But we should not expect these tents to be home. Our desire would be impoverished if we were satisfied in this place. So that mad driving passion wasn’t necessarily bad. It was just confused as to what it really wanted.

Perhaps there were other places where I was looking for a home, other people I asked for something they could never provide. There was a part of me, I believe, that was looking for a woman who would be home. I think I saw it very wrong. I will not find what I am looking for in a person here any more than I will find it in a tent in a refugee camp. But I can provide a tent for a family, and I can keep that tent secure. She can make that tent more like the home that we are returning to. And together we can return to our real home.