Bring 'em home...

Last weekend, we had a women's retreat where a team of women came from Iowa to partner with the leadership team here and blessed our socks off with mounds of gifts (chocolate chips and dove chocolate and pepperoni and ziplocks!!!) and offered us time to sit under amazing, hilarious teaching, beautiful worship and reminders of truth from Psalm 139... that although we may get weary in this daily grind of serving and teaching and living missionally... God sees us. He knows us. He adores us.

While that message is true and affirming to anyone serving anywhere in the world.... God made it very personal to me because he used the speaker to speak truth into a confused place in my heart. Although it wasn't the point of the weekend, the idea of "home" came up again. This has been such a sticky concept for me and something I think about often. Where do we claim as our physical home? When we are asked where we're from, how do we answer? What will my kids look back and remember as their "home"? In the midst of those thoughts this week, my blog post popped up from one year ago when we handed over the keys of our home marking the beginning of this journey where we have landed temporarily in so many other homes seeking God's guidance as he continues to define home for us and to show us what that even means. I reread that post from a little over a year ago and wept again at all those emotions of leaving our little house and some words jumped out at me, "...God is showing me that home is not really about place. Home is where His work for us is. Home is where he wants us."

While that is all true... I feel this... pressure... to be the "homemaker" for my family. Especially our kids. It has always been a weakness of mine...  I'm not good at decorating or organizing. In light of that, how do I actually make each place we live feel welcoming and homey to our kids and our guests in a practical way that allows us to find a place of rest to equip us to go out and serve and do his work?? Because isn't that what home is?? That place where we put on our slippers, sit with our feet up and breathe a big sigh of relief that we can just be. Truly ourselves and totally real.

Even as I type those words... God is tenderly drawing my heart and showing me that that place of home can only be found in his presence. When my kids look back over their years in our home that it will be much less about how their walls were decorated and the organizational systems I had in place and much more about our attitudes. If we were a family led by grace and constantly seeking the lost and trying to bring others into our home. Because it's not about whether I have orderly bookshelves and dishes done when people show up... it's my posture of receiving them with openness and hospitality and listening to them and pointing them to the One who knows them and wants to be known by us and making them feel like they have a place to land wherever we currently are.

God brought it all back to that for me. Home is his presence. That is the place where I can kick my feet up, rest, lay everything down and be my truest self and adored by the One who made me. And I can extend that feeling of home to others by inviting them into God's presence so they can feel the same way. Created, loved, known..... simply because He is. And He made them. And He invites them in.

When I think about that... it fuels the reason we are doing what we're doing. We've gone out to find others and bring 'em home. Home to God's presence. Home to his unconditional love. Home to their eternal place with him. Because when we get to heaven.... the goodbyes that plague this missional life we've embraced will be over. It will only be hellos. Eternal hellos. And those hellos will be so much richer surrounded by people from every tribe, tongue and nation... who God wants us to seek out and bring 'em home to Him.