Home is where the heart is

I was born at home. I came into the world, literally, in the bedroom my parents still sleep in to this day. I obviously never moved around as a child, and so for most of my life my concept of home was fairly fixed. When I think of home, I still picture my parents house, my house, with all the memories that have become embedded there for me throughout my life: getting ready for high school dances, birthday parties, Christmases, Thanksgivings, family game nights of cranium and Mexican train dominoes around our dining room table, cooking with mom in our kitchen, falling asleep to countless movies in the living room and waking up to find that everyone had already gone to bed and left me asleep on the couch. When I think of arriving home, I still picture a golden retriever bounding into the driveway to meet me or a timid cat seeing me and diving down the hallway before I can get to her.  All of these images make me smile because they are who I am, where I come from.

As an adult, however, my concept of home has changed significantly and I am starting to realize that as cliche as it sounds, home really is where the heart is. I have left tiny bits of my heart in numerous places throughout the world, in Denton, Carrollton, Dallas, Houston, Tampa, Antigua, Cochabamba, and I realize that these places too, will always be home for me. 

Yesterday, I arrived home for the fourth time. From the moment I stepped off the plane and out of the airport in Guarulhos, smelled the (70 degree) air, and listened to the portuguese whirling around me, I breathed a sigh of relief and said, “There’s no place like home”. Two years have passed since I have seen the familiar streets of São Bernardo do Campo and yet after only 12 hours of getting settled in I feel like only weeks (if that) have passed. There are many things that make this place home for me, the majority of which I can’t even put into words. 

One of the things I can articulate, however, is the hospitality. After only a few hours I am  realizing (again) how closed off my life is in the U.S. I never answer the door if I am home alone (it’s probably just a solicitor). My door remains locked at all times, even if I am home. Sometimes I open my blinds in my window, but never the window itself (wouldn’t want nosy neighbors being able to see me.) I drive straight to school/work and straight back without having to interact with anyone except the voices on my ipod. I arrange my schedule to be as time efficient as possible, allowing the minimum amount of time possible to get places. When I run into someone I know on campus, if I am lucky, it is a polite head nod and hello, keeping in step since I have to make sure I get everything done on my to do list that day. No time for unscheduled encounters. 

Here, the window in my little apartment was open before I even moved in, just as are all the windows (and many doors) of my neighbors. Within 10 minutes of me arriving, my neighbor Dalva brought me a “vitamina”, a smoothie with mango, banana and melon. When she realized I hadn’t eaten she immediately told me she would make me lunch and within the hour I was sitting at her apartment across the courtyard enjoying my first delicious almoço of rice, beans, meat, carrots, mexerica and the best (and strongest) coffee in the world with her and her family. Throughout the day people came by my window (still open) to introduce themselves and welcome me. Dalva came back with more melon in the evening for me to try and waved at me every time I left my apartment. I know that any time I venture out to do something, I should leave as much time as possible to do so, because you never know when a chance encounter with an old friend on the street is going to turn into a 45 minute conversation.

I have always been somewhat proud of my efficient self. There is nothing better than knocking items off my to do list. But I wonder where in the midst of that list I am missing beautiful opportunities to experience the grace of God, the hospitality of others, and even extend hospitality myself? Where am I missing the open windows, the smell of fresh air, good meals, great coffee, encouraging conversations, fits of laughter and joy? Maybe I should start putting these on my to do list down here. Maybe my to do list should be reduced to one item that I make sure I accomplish each day: Just be. With myself, with God, with others, just be. 

Welcome home. 

Ruthless Trust

I was reminded this weekend of Brennan Manning’s book Ruthless Trust. If you haven’t ever heard of Brennan Manning, he is an amazing author and you need to go look up his book Ragamuffin Gospel immediately. One of the comments he makes in his book Ruthless Trust is about a friend of his who tells him, “Brennan, you don’t need any more deep theological insights about God. I think you just need to trust the ones you have.” (paraphrase) While obviously, we should forever be in a process of seeking out and learning new things about the wonderful, deep, mysterious God who loves us, I resonate with his words of learning to trust the experiences and the knowledge that we have had of God’s love. I sometimes wonder what the church, the world, would look like if we really began to let those truths of God’s love, grace, mercy, and justice, settle into our beings? We can talk about amazing grace, but what does it look like spending the rest of your life letting the truth of that grace seep into every nook and cranny of your being? Do I really live my life on a day to day basis like someone who is seeped in grace? What does it look like to live into the knowledge that we are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God? Would it change how we view ourselves? How we treat others? If we truly heeded Jesus’s words to love God and love others, and really asked ourselves what it means on a day to day, even hour by hour, basis to love one another, even (and maybe especially) in the smallest, seemingly insignificant details of our lives, how different would our world be? How would our lives be changed and open up floodgates of healing and transformation?

Something in me has to wonder why it is indeed so difficult for us to continually grasp onto these truths about ourselves and God. What causes us to doubt, to fear, to mistrust that which we have experienced in the past of God’s grace and love? Why do we hear powerful words on Sunday mornings or in a quiet moment with God and then so quickly forget them? I was recently re-reading journals from 5 years ago. I save my journals as dates, so I was actually reading a journal entry that was written 5 years ago to the exact date. The ironic part was that I was asking the same basic questions then as I am now. Struggling with many of the same issues (albeit in maybe a different form, or with a different name or set of circumstances) I suddenly realized the answers to the questions I was asking 5 years ago were essentially the same answers I am getting today when I fire off questions to God about my future (or my present). “Trust me. Follow me. The story isn’t over yet. Keep going. I will provide for you. You are mine. Experience the tension and the struggle in all of this and learn from it. This is going to be hard but I will be with you. Never let fear prevent you from moving forward (or cause you to move backward). Trust your heart. Keep loving as if your life depended on it. One day you will look back and you might find a bit more understanding and reason to all this, but until that day (if that day does in fact come), just trust me. I have never let you down in the past, and I won’t start now.” 

My prayer is that 5 years from now, I might trust God a little bit more with my questions and my answers. My prayer is that we would all be overwhelmed by the amount of grace and love in our lives and that it would transform us. That it would change how we treat others. That our knowledge of the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love, would not just be an academic knowledge or a theoretical knowledge, but may be that which fills us with all the fullness of God. May we cease from being visionaries who know every street in town and can’t find our way home. May we all learn to live into a ruthless trust of God’s promises. May it change who we are. May it change who we want to be. May it cause us to move forward without fear and may it bring us peace. Amen. 

Guard your Heart!

I remember sitting at a bible study in college and hearing this advice. It was during the days of I Kissed Dating Goodbye. [Anyone remember this gem? :) ] Of course it was a bible study for “young singles” and we were talking about the pitfalls of dating and “giving away pieces of your heart too soon”. Even outside of church, I can, in fact, remember the many times that I received these words from well meaning loved ones. At the time I thought it made perfect sense. Be careful with your heart. Don’t get yourself hurt. Be on guard and make sure you only love those that are worthy of your love. The older I get however, I am learning that this advice, while well meaning, can be slightly misinterpreted. (Caveat: It goes without saying that in cases of physical safety, abuse, etc. one needs to protect him or herself. Also, one of the most important lessons in life is sometimes to learn to walk away when enough is enough and know how to love yourself enough to know when you are being respected and when you are not. Okay. caveat over.)

It seems to me (or I can say it has been my own personal experience) that this advice can lead to unnecessary guilt, the impression that if we love another person and for whatever reason the relationship does not work out and we get hurt, that it must be our own fault. We should have seen it coming. We should have guarded our heart better. We should have learned our lesson from the last time. In addition to guilt over seemingly reckless love, on the other extreme these words can also cause us to be too cautious and not give love a chance. We don’t want to have our heart broken, so it is better to keep our heart locked up and at the end of the day, if our heart is intact, safe and comfortable, we have won. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

I remember the first time I had my heart truly broken. It was the summer of 2004 and I had spent 6 weeks living in Smokey Mountain, at one time, one of the largest active garbage dumps in the world, located in Manila, The Philippines. Over the course of the six weeks I had fallen in love with two little girls, Mia and Ella. Every day at the end of the day Mia’s mom had to come drag her out of my family’s small home so that I could go to bed. And many mornings I awoke to her beautiful face peaking over the top of the stairs at me to see if I was awake, “Ate Emily? Magandang umaga!” I had fallen in love with both of them and spent many an afternoon playing with them until I was exhausted. 

It was the day we were leaving and I remember trying to find them, terrified that I would have to leave without saying goodbye. As my team gathered in the jeepney to go, I delayed as long as I could, waiting to give them one last hug. They finally appeared and after many tears and hugs I finally climbed into the jeepney and we started to drive away. As I looked back on my community, I saw Mia and Ella start to run after the jeepney, as fast as their little legs could carry them, “Ate Emilyyyyy!!!! Ate Emilyyyy!!!” And that was it. That was the moment when my heart first shattered into a million pieces (some of which are still no doubt laying in and among the dirt and dust of Smokey Mountain). But in that moment of total and utter devastation, a still small voice said to me, “Now you know my heart for the world. Now you know what it is like, even in a small part, to love like I love.” I carry those words with me until today to remind me that if we are indeed called to love like God loves, it will mean that we get our heart broken. It means that we will risk hurting and being hurt, experience the highest highs and the lowest lows, abundant life and abundant sadness.  We will laugh and dance and sing and we will weep and we will sob. We will win and we will fail. But at the end of the day, we will experience the heart of God. In the words of C.S Lewis...

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intake, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly save from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”- C.S Lewis, The Four Loves

May we all have the courage to get our hearts broken...