Almost Home

Psalm 27

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• Your face, Lord, do I seek
• I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord
• Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage

Applying the Word to My Life:
I am reading the Story of a Soul by Thérèse of Lisieux and I'm a little envious. From the time she was a young girl she had a single desire — to give herself entirely to Christ. She learned where that home was — the Carmelite Monastery at Lisieux. She wanted to live in the house where she knew she could be closest to Him. She knew where her home was before she was old enough to go there.

Getting there was another matter. She tried to enter young — younger than the rules allowed — and was turned away. She made the journey to see her Bishop with her father, hoping he would grant permission. One of the most tender moments in the book is the Bishop comforting her even while his answer was still not yet.

What holds me in that moment is not the sorrow — it's what held underneath it. She did not walk away from the Bishop's office convinced she had been wrong about the desire. She walked away believing that God would still bring her home. The door closed. The desire didn't. It deepened.

David is writing from a similar place in our reading. He knows where home is — the temple, the house of the Lord, the place of God's presence where things are safe and familiar and whole. Like Thérèse, he has one desire. The problem is that he is not there. Life has called him out, and he didn't choose that any more than Thérèse chose to be turned away by her Bishop.

We don't always get to choose where home is. Thérèse didn't select the Carmel the way you pick a destination — she recognized God there. David didn't select the temple that way either. What each of them chose was whether to seek His face from wherever they stood. That is the only choice that was actually theirs to make, and both of them made it.

If finding and staying home was all we were called to do, then we wouldn't have the living faith the world needs. The Apostles spent nine days in the upper room — the home where everything had happened, the place that had formed them — and then the Spirit came and they walked out the door. They carried what that room had given them into a world that couldn't come to them. David would never have left the temple, and Thérèse would never have changed our hearts, if staying was the whole point.

There is a gift in the leaving, even when the leaving is hard. When David goes back into the field he carries the presence with him. The people who cannot get to the temple — the ones for whom the gates of the sanctuary are out of reach — encounter God through him. He brings the temple to the field because the temple has formed him. He leaves home with his heart full, pours it out on the field, and comes back to be refilled, and goes out again.

Thérèse eventually made it to Carmel. She entered at fifteen, lived inside those walls for nine years, and died at twenty-four without ever leaving them. And yet her presence went everywhere. She was named co-patroness of the missions — not because she traveled, but because she carried. She recognized God so completely in her home that the presence radiated outward through walls she never crossed.

We have a natural pull toward restlessness — chasing God somewhere more promising, somewhere the walls are thinner or the presence feels closer. David knew that pull. So did Thérèse. What they both learned is that the chase is the thing that keeps you from arriving. The stability of home — the upper room, the Carmel, the place where God has already met you — is not where you hide from the world. It is where He fills you up enough to go back out into it.

The home is not a refuge from the mission. It is where the mission begins.

My Response for Today:
Today I will return to the place where God meets me most clearly — not to stay, but to be filled.