A Tribute to My Love: There's No Place Like Home

 

The Wizard of Oz has long been one of my favorite movies.

My great aunt, Evie, had it recorded on an old VHS tape that we used to watch over and over. As I think of it now I can still feel that old carpet in front of the oversized tv, I can see the pile of various toys and funny eighties work out equipment in the corner, I can hear the sound of her mixing up ice cream and peanut butter in the kitchen behind me, and I can still feel the love that was shared between her, my siblings, cousins and me. I realize that part of the memory that makes The Wizard of Oz so sweet in my mind is where I watched it first, and who I watched it with. That little home in Deerfield, Ms and the adjoining one attached to it that my grandparents lived in, are forever solidified in my mind's eye as "home" and as Dorothy repeats, there truly is no place like it.

 

Although, I've known many "homes" in my life.

 

Various places in Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Nola, Missouri, and Colorado

have all become places where I associate this feeling of home. In fact, as I sit here and count I can think of off hand about 15 different places in my life where I have called home.

 

For some people "home" has been pretty much in one place throughout their whole lives, but I consider it a true blessing that home for me has been spread out across the country in several different houses. Because of this fact I think I do consider home to be more of an intangible.

 

And this has never been more true than with my little family here in Houston.

Last week's brutally honest post about our struggles here garnered many much needed prayers and comments from friends and family with well wishes and encouragements. And though I needed to spill my heart out in the way I did and appreciate greatly all the love I received, I wanted to make one thing clear, My Heart is at peace here no matter what storms we weather, because my heart is at home with Cliff and Campbell in the loving arms of our Father.

 

This past week I had a conversation with another teaching parent that I am coming to really respect as a spiritual advisor here on campus. He recounted to me a time one of his church pastors shared with him that they pray for us as teaching parents as though we are missionaries and as though BGC is a mission field. And then this friend of mine said that he took that to heart, and I should too. The place where we have chosen to raise our young families, though technically part of the greater Houston area, is a world away in many others. It truly is a calling, he told me, to be home missionaries to children in need. And though it sometime does feel that we are miles and miles away from home here on this mission field, in so many other ways it doesn't at all.

 

When I first started dating C, my Mimi, after her first time meeting him, said, "He's just so easy to know." And it was true for me, too. Part of what led me to fall in love with him in the beginning was how easy it was to get to know him, and how so quickly it felt that he was as close to me as my own family was. I remember early on in our relationship being reminded of that line from the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan classic Sleepless in Seattle when Hanks' character describes falling in love with his wife by saying,

"It was like coming home... only to no home I'd ever known.."

 

And ever since those early days of dating a few years ago this has been true for us. In our four years of marriage we have lived in three different homes counting our home here at BGC where we actually shuffle between two small apartments depending on our assignment. But that's ok, always has been, always will. Because home truly is more about who I am with, than where I am.

 

In the last few weeks our family has had some kind of crazy circumstances where my parents have actually had to very quickly move out of the home in South Mississippi where they have lived for close to ten years. Cliff and I got married there under the pergola Daddy built in the backyard, its the place where I lived when I first met him, and its also the only house our son knows to be his grandparent's home. They moved so quickly we didn't even really get to see it one last time. Though we know truly that this move was right for them at this time, this was hard for it all to happen so fast.

 

 At the same time in the last few weeks the houses that Cliff  and I shared when we lived in both MS and Nola more or less officially became no longer ours. The house in MS that had been on the market for a while has finally sold (PTL) and Cliff's sister and her family are moving into the house we left in Nola when we came here to Texas. These three back to back events basically mean that those places we called home are gone and the new places where we lie our heads to rest at night are even more so officially our new homes. No turning back, this is where we now live! Ha ha!

 

 

 

Letting go of those places of dwelling, especially all at once, has been hard on me, but I think also that it has been by the Lord's design for it to happen this way.

 

This past week, as we shared a new home in a cottage full of little girls, C and I celebrated our anniversary. Five years dating, and four years married on July 9.

 

 

I think now more than ever, I have a renewed sense of that feeling I had when I was first dating him, except now, the feeling I have in my heart is no longer like a place I have never known, but rather the greatest of all places I have ever called home.

 

Just before we moved to Houston, as we anticipated this journey that unfolds before us now, good days and bad, I came across a song by a group called Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros that resonated with me.

I knew then and know even more clearly now that this is our anthem.

Cliff, My Love, truly, "Home is Wherever I'm With You."