Lord, you have been our dwelling place for all generations. From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. Psalm 90:1
I’m writing from the home I grew up in, near Shelly Minnesota. The family and I are here for a week of vacation, having a late Christmas with my relatives and celebrating with my parents their 50th wedding anniversary. It has been a great trip! How can the earth get so cold? This morning we clocked in at minus 20. In this neck of the woods, where necks are wound up tight with homemade scarves, belief in “global warming” is a tough sell. Being here, however, gets me to-thinking: how places, buildings and memories can be, at the same time, familiar and different.
While worshiping with my family in the little country church called Bethany, I found myself looking around the sanctuary (yes, during the sermon) and noticing some of the same things I noticed when I was a child: the small crosses near the ceiling, encircling the whole perimeter of the room, that are part of the design of the building; the large painting of Jesus bending his ear toward a door and rapping, depicting verses from the book of Revelation, “behold I stand at the door and knock.” I remember that as a child, I would look at these static pieces of decor and wonder about them. Now I wonder about these objects too, but this time I wonder whom they were purchased in memory of.
What happens to us when we go home? For me, there is comfort and a sense of completeness in going back to where it all started. Mom and Dad have lived in this house about 40 years. I can still find my way around this place, like where the cold medicine is kept, even in the dark of night. As certain things have been worn by age, I find myself thinking that I wouldn’t like to fix or replace them. They are part of my past, and yes, I’m perhaps more sentimental than is healthy or wise.
But, there is also a sense of figuring out in what ways I am different, now that I have established a home elsewhere. The self really does shift and change, and hopefully mature over time, and the act of going away and coming back home helps to highlight those changes. Going away doesn’t create those changes. If anyone wants to mature, they will have to do some hard work whether they are at home or not. New experiences usually have to fit into newly created categories, and the past is then simply one of my resources at hand, among many, resources for my desire to understand myself always in a clearer way.
Getting finally to a spiritual message for this article, it is good to be reminded of verses like these from Psalm 90. What if God is not a fixed “dwelling place” but instead a kind of dwelling place that comes alongside us and has something to say in every part of life? In a way, God is a pop-up tent that provides a bit of refuge along the way. I like having a mobile God. Peace to you, as the Bright Morning Star guides in the Season of Epiphany.
