Leaving home...

Leaving home...My friend Clare is leaving home next week headed to college. She and her mother Janet have been getting ready for the move... anticipating the bittersweet pain of separation that is confirmation of a job well done. After seventeen years of living in the same space, sharing the joys and sorrows, accomplishments and disappointments, being family under the same roof, a shift is under way in the bedrock of her family definition.
My father was unable to let go gracefully of his children. When it was time for me to go to college, daddy told me he would pay for me to attend college in our hometown as long as I lived at home. Being the compliant (most of the time) older daughter, I knuckled under, stayed home and went to Valdosta State College. My dream had been to attend William and Mary in Virginia near my mother’s family, but I did not have the resources in money or backbone to pull that off. My experience of college life was constrained since transportation was limited to riding with my mother when she went to work. Any night classes or social opportunities had to be planned in advance. My sister, who had more get up and go than I did, defied Daddy and paid her way to live in the dorm by working at Sears. I officially left home when I married Tim, driving away to Fort Rucker, Alabama poorly equipped to stand on my own two feet.
Leaving home has been a life long process. I spent some time wandering in the wilderness, angry at my father and his fathering. I chose to distance myself as a way to avoid facing the part I had played in the leaving home drama. As I remarried, had children, watched my parents age and my sister die, leaving home helped me come home. Somewhere, some how, I came to know my parents as people... two people who had their own stories to tell... not just as one dimensional parents who weren’t perfect. And in coming home, I found myself
I have left many homes since I first drove away from my parents home. I left my home state of Georgia to move to a large city where I knew two people. I left my home church world for the wider world of seminary education. I left the eastern part of our country and moved to Texas where they call shrubs trees and creeks rivers. I left the first home we bought and moved across the country to a demolition derby house that I remodeled while Michael was in graduate school. I have left church homes sometimes in grief, twice in anger, always feeling the wrench of letting go of something dear and deep. I have watched our children leave home, one by one, moving out into the world beyond all they have known growing up, letting go of the home we had created with children and moving on to a different kind of homeplace. I have felt the pain of seeing my childhood home empty without my father’s welcoming presence...leaving home not by choice but by necessity.
And yet in leaving I have found new homes, new places and people who become family and church and community for me. In the leaving is a new beginning. Loss can make room for life to flourish and flower. Coming home makes leaving home worth it. Without truly leaving home, I could not have found solid ground for my faith and my life. Without coming home, I could not have honored those who birthed me, raised me, loved me and let me go.
My church families have given me a sense of the Holy, a language of Love, an assurance of my worth as a creation of God that had very little to do with the version of the Bible they read or the theology preached from the pulpit. In every church home of mine, there have been people who were the face of God for me, the loving arms of Jesus for me, and the invisible Holy Spirit made visible in those who pushed, prodded and pricked my settler instincts. This family of God is like Joseph’s coat of many colors... a Baptist Student Union Director who saw something in me I did not know was there, Texas women who helped me birth my first baby in our first church, a pastor who brought comfort and solace when my soul was sore with grief, seminary friends scattered around the country who remember me when, women friends who shared church pews and helped raise my children and me, old ladies and young women, men and boys, all a part of my Joseph’s Coat family of faith. I give thanks for them.
So remember, Clare, you have to leave home. It is a necessary part of growing into who you were created to be. It is necessary for your parents as they grow into who they have been created to be. Leaving home will give you room to fall on your face and pick yourself up. Leaving home will give you new eyes to see and new ears to hear. Leaving home is a grand adventure. You cannot come home unless you leave home. And coming home is worth all the struggles and separation and pain of leaving.
“If a person loves me, they will keep my word and my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them.” John 14:23 My prayer for you is that wherever you may be in your going out and your coming back, God will always be at home with you and you at home with God. I love you. I am praying for you. Go with God.