Waiting for Home...

For just a little more than a year, we have called this home our own. I can still remember walking through our front door and knowing that this was going to be home.

Back then, Starbucks paid our bills and fueled our energy and I can still remember the look on Lyla's face when she asked me, No more moving, Mama? This is home?

Tony and I? We had looked at each other that evening we got the keys and we both agreed - No. More. Moving. We needed roots and this home was going to provide.

And then he got that job in the complete opposite end of town - and I'm trying to remember the day when this house we're in didn't feel like home anymore.

But it really doesn't. Home to me is on that street with those big old trees and those old stately houses. Home to me has graffiti sprayed across it and is held together with the unknown across the road from the Mission. 

I can't explain it.

I keep coming back to that verse in the Psalms - If what is so heavy in our hearts was placed there by Him, what is there really to be afraid of?

Tony and I sat across from each other last night; I had been quiet and so he asked why,

and I told him that I can't find the words, other than this tightening in my chest that is making it so hard to breathe. As though there is a fire burning low in my lungs and I can barely sit still under it. Like i can't get down there fast enough - and it hurts, this waiting. I told him, that the rational part of me should be scared. There's drive-by's and drugs and gangs and just last summer a little girl had been shot in her front yard. But then I told him I'm so tired of trying to keep up - keep up with neighbours and Target and I still haven't decorated all my walls...I'm tired of trying to find a comfort that has never been mine to have because when I said yes to Jesus I said no to everything else.

I feel like I should be terrified. And I am, but it isn't for the reasons that I feel I should be. I'm terrified of not obeying His call. And I hear it - as though His Voice is just quiet enough, barely loud enough to catch and it's pulling me, pulling my heart towards His plan for us there.

At the beginning of June, when I first opened that book, I really did mean it when I offered Him my anything. I stripped beds this morning, gathering up sheets to tumble in the washer, and my hands began to shake as the magnitude of this decision sets in. Anything means everything and am I really, really that willing?

.

My heart races to the impatient pounding of the dreams I believe Jesus is giving, but I have no idea what all He has in store for us there. 

And satan - he will do anything to discourage.

I think that's why I need to write this down tonight, as a marker of sorts - a laying down of my own stones of witness to watch over my yes to His call. Yes to whatever He asks of us.

There is a home - actually two - that are opening up. We still own this one. 

This side of those tracks whispers safety.

That side of those tracks holds our hearts.

There is so much standing between us and the vision we have been given.

It's so easy to become discouraged with all there is to do - but we have done this before. We have heard His voice and our hearts have responded to His pull. So we'll do what we try and do each time He asks us to trust...

We'll keep moving forward until He opens the door and we will only stop when that door is closed by His hand.

Either way, I am desperate for Him. Desperate to be in His will and to be exactly where He wants us.

Here is my stone, my altar before Him.