I am a home body.
I love home. I love the familiarity, the warmth, the family, the routine, the safety, the sense of being enclosed from outside forces. I love it. It is something I look forward to returning to after a day’s work.
My recent history has seen us move houses and locations fairly frequently. So far since I got married, the longest I’ve spent in the same house is 2 years. So moving has been a prominent part of the script and in as much as it’s traumatic for the whole family, I must confess, even now I find it unsettling and disturbing. That’s because I love home.
I have, however, a growing appreciation for the fact that a lot of my development in my life has taken place outside home. I don’t just mean that in the familial sense.
With a sheltered and enclosed upbringing where it was only home-school-church as the places of life, my view of the world was very limited. Indeed because of the isolationist tendency of the church in which I grew and my own introverted approach, my view of Jesus and the Church was very limited – and very limiting.
It never occurred to me that there was that much more to the world than what the comforts and routines of home life had shown. Even as there was more, there was no great desire to explore it, because it meant going outside.
Thank God then that He kicked me outside.
He kicked me outside home when I went to university. He kicked me out of the home I made in London when I followed the call to move to Stoke-on-Trent. He kicked me out of my home of loner-ship when He gave my beautiful wife. He kicked me out of my home of selfishness when He gave me precious, beautiful children. He kicked me out of my home of limited faith when I learnt to trust Him when I had no money or job in my first 17 months in Stoke-on-Trent. He kicked me out of my home of denominational mind-set when I joined the YMCA in 2006. He kicked me out of my home of limited church when He opened me up to deep, loving, supportive relationships with people outside my immediate church family.
Most importantly He kicked me out of my home of a low view of who I was when He entered my life by His Spirit and said He will make His home in me.
He did all of this to prove a point – a point He proves to everyone He ‘calls out’. The point is this – there is more to who God is than we find inside our own made homes of security and comfort. To know Him greater and deeper and see Him for who He is, sometimes we have to go outside.
It’s scary because we don’t have the comforts and familiar touchstones. Yet as He takes us outside, in a real way He is extending our view of home.
He shows home is as much serving the homeless in the streets on a cold winter’s night, as it is tucking into a lovely Sunday dinner with your family.
He shows home can be as much learning about a new culture and embracing God in it, as it is chilling in your living room watching your favourite TV programme.
He shows this and so much more to state quite clearly that wherever He is can be home even when it appears unfamiliar or even hostile and intimidating.
It might be worth considering that as God wants us to grow – sometimes we may have to do that by going outside.
Where is ‘outside’ for you?
(Photo by Andrew Charney on Unsplash)
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
C. L. J. Dryden
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