I realize today while driving north on 377 that it is exactly a year since I stepped feet on this part of Texas. I came to visit a friend, to get some space, to reevaluate and say things out loud. I planned to go home with no plans of moving here. Ever.
Texas is ugly, I said, and it kind of is. Texas is flat, I said, and it definitely is. Texas is hot and suffocating, I said, and it is, especially today. But there have been moments of beauty here, small hills crested that take my breath away, and the evening Texas breeze is unlike anything I have ever known.
I began to say it a few weeks ago, out loud, to myself, to whoever would ask or listen: here I am home.
I've moved a lot, always in search of some place to call my own, something that felt comfortable, me, safe. I have never found it.
Until I stopped looking for it.
Texas was not meant to be home and looking back, I don't think any place I have been has been home. I am too uncomfortable with myself to be comfortable anywhere else.
What I mean to say is that the itch of homesickness will always be present. The tears come quickly this week, as my dear friend and I have swapped places, she kayaks on my rivers, sits with my favorite people, takes pictures of the startling blues and greens of my home. The tears are every present as my best friend is climbing new hills with a new best friend of the male persuasion. The tears are there when I remember that the people with whom I have shared my life are graduating with their doctorate in medicine today, having faith and babies named Gideon this summer, being wed this fall. All things bright and beautiful, all things I am missing because I have chosen Texas as home in this season.
It is so hard to miss things. So hard to know beyond a doubt that you are exactly where you are meant to be and yet feel still the gnawing in your soul that says: not home yet.
When I was 21 a father in my faith explained the Already/Not Yet theology and it is a comfort to me since. We are already finished and not yet finished. We are already saved and not yet fully saved. He has already established His kingdom and is still establishing His kingdom. We know God and yet we do not fully know Him.
We are home and yet we are not home.
So in the meantime, and there is plenty of that, we comfort ourselves with this: everywhere is home until we are home.
Everywhere we plant our feet, everywhere we see glimpses of Christ, everywhere we preach His word with our words and our lives, every door we open and every door that feels closed, this is home.
We are home.
And yet we are still headed home.