jess in the mundane

6pm signaled one thing and one thing only – dinner time. As was our custom, the girls from my dormitory joined the boys in the dinning hall. This was my very first week in boarding school, and was to be the beginning of an arduous process of getting acclimatized to a controlled environment.

In no time, the hall bustled with the sound of utensils clattering and students chattering. Yours truly took a seat and began chowing down the contents placed before her. For some reason, however, this evening felt different. Was it a temperature change? Or was the meal itself odd? I couldn’t tell. All I knew was that one moment all was swell and dandy, and the next moment something wasn’t quite right. It felt like an atmosphere shift, but an internal one. The noise around me slowly muffled, and memories of my family flashed through my mind. Like lightning, a sudden realization hit my nine-year-old brain; “…..this is not home….. I want to go home”. Tears welled in my eyes, and a towering wave of sadness washed over. Here, in middle of dinner, seated amongst peers and strangers, yours truly wept.

Thinking back, I realize that this experience was a very humbling and necessary lesson. I had been overly optimistic about moving into a boarding house at nine, and packed sufficiently. But in my preparation, not once did the possibility of missing home cross my mind. For the longest time, I had longed to breathe the air of relative independence, and was won over by stories my mom told of her own junior and senior high school boarding adventures. But although the dorms were called “a home away from home”, I learned very quickly that even though upon still, there is no place like home.

As an adult, I’ve had my fair share of moving. Into new dorms, into friend’s apartments, into completely new geographical locations. But I think my idea of what truly makes home feel like home has evolved. Home isn’t a physical location anymore, but more-so a specific and familiar warmth generated by the presence of people we’re dearly fond of. There have been seasons where I have struggled with making or feeling at home in a new place because of attachments to a previous one. But adulting has drilled in me the lesson of the dynamic nature of life, and the importance of holding things we are called by the Lord to steward with a loose grip. So that if or when circumstances change, we are not left with a sense of loss.

More specifically, or at least in this season of my life, home to me has been a person, God. As someone that is quite change-averse, (meaning, I really, really, really want things to stay the way they always have, especially if it’s to my advantage), I have learned that regardless of where I may go, I take home with me. Ummm, like a tortoise with its shell on its back? Lol, no. But in a very practical and real sense, God’s presence permeates every place that exists, and His Spirit is on the inside of me.

The immutability and infinity of God sufficiently answers my deep desire for unchanging familiarity in a way that no one on earth is equipped to. Change may be inevitable, but the Lord is a fixed constant who’s been with me from my first breath, and who will be with me forever. And so, slowly but surely, I’m learning that I am never truly far from home, because the core of home is my ever-present Lord.

Love,

Jess