Every person leaves home.
You may have moved to a different house or city. You may have even immigrated from a different country. Perhaps you left home for college and returned after your first semester to find that your belongings have been placed elsewhere and your friends are not as available as they once were. You may have experienced personal change and family relationships you had may have changed for better or for worse. Maybe you experienced a tragedy and your ability to feel safe has forever changed.
Regardless of whether you have emotionally and/or physically left home, what once was no longer is. Though it is enticing to ask, or even manipulate, others to return to the way they once were, it is often difficult, filled with arguments and unmet expectations. People change and, in many ways, experiencing a change in life is like leaving home.
If I was the director of my life, I would ask all the actors in my play to remain as they are. I wish they would all act exactly the way I want them to. Despite my self-centered desires, I know that I am ultimately powerless over my life. I do not have the power to control people.
At the core of my desire and anxiety to ensure everyone plays their role in the acts I create is a fear of and refusal to admit a change has already occurred. I do not want to admit that my relationships with my family have changed. I do not want to admit that certain relationships I had with my friends were not as healthy as I thought they were. I do not want to admit that returning to the place I once called home is painful. If I do admit that…well, that just leaves me with grief and accepting that what I once called home is not home anymore.
It seems culture does not wish to promote the idea that sadness is good.
People hand tissues to those who are crying to remove the tears from the sad faces. People say “don’t cry, it’s okay” when life is not. Popular media is not very keen on stories that have no happy endings. I want the hero to win. I want the sadness to mean something. I want something good to placate the sadness I feel. But feeling through the sadness and grief have often been the platform on which I begin to accept responsibility and to find more passion for my life.
Sadness is the emotion that recognizes that something has mattered.
Home has mattered to me and sadness is the emotion I must feel to live in the reality that I have left home; I have left my own Egypt and have entered into the desert.
The story of Moses leading the Israelites out of slavery and out of Egypt and guiding them into the desert is one that I have found very helpful in understanding where my life is and where it could go. Leaving home for me has meant entering the desert. “
Where do I go now? What do I do?”
I feel great anxiety over a lack of clear choices. I really want quick solutions. Many times, I have prayed for God to show me the way. While my words spoke of surrender to God, my desperation to see something that looks like a way out indicated to me that I had very little surrender. I love BIG moments, just like I love watching heroes win in cinematic fashion. I yearn for the moment that after all the suffering in the desert, my life lottery has finally come; God rewards my patience with tangible victory!
Yet, what I have now taken away from this story is that this mentality is just the same as demanding God to make water from rocks – miracles. “If I submit myself to this suffering then God must reward me! How can He not after I paid Him with my submission? And the payment better be full!” I have found this quid pro quo view to be a great motivator to endure great pain for my own “miraculous victory.” In search of my great payoff, I have become blinded by entitlement and have missed the very point of leaving Egypt: growing up.
What has been more true to reality in my life is that most of the pain of leaving home just remains. Miracles do not happen in the theatrical ways I wish they would and neither does growing up. The sadness of lost homes is a pool of water that needs to be drained, not bottled up and stored away.
After years of endurance that has been driven by my entitlement, I am just more tired than I was before and even more so because of all the sadness I have been carrying. The desert moments of my life brought me to my knees. I may have left home for something greater, but I still find myself stuck in a desert. I do not want to go back because home has changed greatly for me, but I can not seem to find the courage to go anywhere else either.
If I am even more truthful, I convince myself occasionally that what I had in Egypt was not that bad and that I myself can change it! Why can’t I just be Peter Pan? But as I replayed the cycle of denial that home is no longer home, over and over, I only returned to the desert. In many ways, I felt I had been exiled to purgatory.
If home isn’t home anymore, then acceptance of the end of what once was is my answer. I am powerless over change. Home is not home anymore and I must grow up. Facing this reality, I committed to exiting my cycle. What eventually got me out of it was a reconnection of my head to my heart. Eradicating behaviors that help me bypass and avoid my sadness, I have been able to keep myself from repeating the cycle of denial. Avoiding those behaviors and sitting with my deep core emotions, I re-invited my heart to feel.
My heart ultimately brought the deep pool of sadness to my face. Allowing grief to come, I began to accept my losses; there is no going back. Tears after tears, I accepted my departure from home. With ties cut, I was free to face the desert. Very much like a desert, I discovered how powerless I have really been in my life and how futile clawing my way out has been.
What remained was the option to surrender to God who has all the power. Trusting in His benevolence, I chose to follow, eating the daily manna that falls from the sky and learning to live day by day. Eventually, I met fellow travelers who became my friends and rediscovered a God who does for me what I cannot do for myself. Day by day, living with what God gives me, I received the eyes to see that I actually am and have been going somewhere all along. I am returning home. This home is not the home I once left, but a new home.
With every step of surrender and every moment of connection, I am catching a sniff of what home smells like. Somehow, after accepting my losses, I have regained so much of what I had lost in ways I had never thought was possible! From departure to denial to grief to acceptance, I no longer wander like a nomad. I am on a pilgrimage home. Though the road is filled with sadness, loneliness, and hurt, it is also filled with gladness and a connection to my heart, others, and God. Together, they all make the road a little less lonely, much fuller, and more alive.