Going Home

I don’t think there is ever as much anticipation in our lives as the moment when we get to go home after having been away for a long time. As we draw near to the town, the building or the room that our hearts call home, there is that great expectancy that rises up from somewhere in our gut and overwhelms us. I have used the word “home” to describe many places along the journey of my life so far but there are two places specifically that hold a special place in the world for me. In the past few weeks I have had the chance to “come home” to both places after a long time of being away.
The place that in my childhood memories is known as home is the small village of Faradje, which is in northeastern Congo. I hadn’t been back to Faradje in ten years but a few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit the village for a few hours to assess the needs of people after recent attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army. As the small Cessna airplane circled the town and made the final approach to the dirt runway, my heart was racing in anticipation of what lay ahead. What would it be like after so many years away? Would people be excited to see me? As I exited the plane and began to greet people I was overwhelmed by the sense that at long last I was able to come back to a place I was familiar with and that was familiar with me.
We took the time to take a short tour of our old house and as I entered my old bedroom I could almost sense the morning sun beating in through the windows to wake me from my sleep or the afternoon rains railing against the house in that seasonal wonder that changes everything from brown to green. I could remember the goats outside bleating to one another as they ate all of my dad’s fruit trees and the evening cooing of the doves and cookals. The room was much smaller than I remember but just the same, it was a place of memory.
Similarly, when I knew we would be spending some time at my parents’ house in Entebbe while we plan for our next project in Congo, I was expectant at the prospect of going home. Entebbe is home, not so much because I have any particular attachment to the town or the house, but because I know that my mom has spent hours painstakingly cleaning my room of all the cat and dog hair that might set off my allergies and my parents will be content because I am home. It is home because I am in the arms of love.
These journeys home have made me think yet again about the greater journey home that I am on. As I think of that final home that I am looking forward to, my expectation is so much greater. It is the expectation that there will be justice and peace and all the things that make me long for the homes I have now will be filled in that one final destination. I will have a house where I won’t think of the beauty within or of the view, but it will be a house where I am in awe of the one who prepared it for me because it is only with him that I will finally feel fully at home.
In the work that I am doing I am constantly reminded of the broken world we live in. There are the lives ruined by war and the lives stripped of dignity by poverty, and in all of it there is a longing for something, someplace that is free of all this destruction and brokenness. There is a longing to go home.