Christmas, An Invitation To Come Home

​Home.

As a kid I was frequently plotting to run away from home, even attempted it a couple of times.

Then I spent a little over a decade of my early adulthood living in the woods mentoring teenagers. I'm not sure if those woods were home or hiding from home. My guess is the latter.

I moved on from there, got married and bought a house that I lived in for 15 years, a house that in many ways never did come to feel like home. I no longer live in that home or that marriage.

I sometimes wonder, has my whole life been running away from home?

Home.

Maybe I've never come to figure out what home is enough to know if I was there or not. What is home, really? Is it a place? A person? A feeling?

Or is it possible that home is Christmas? Is Christmas the answer to a longing that to various degrees none of us have ever truly had met.

I think about that first Christmas. Mary and Joseph traveling in search of a physical home, and then their child - our baby Jesus - born in a manger because they ultimately couldn't find one. From the very beginning, the savior of the world entered into a world that could not offer him a home.

Was that maybe the point? That the one who came from heaven to this world was never going to find a home here as a reminder that we will never find one here either. Are we forever left with some unfulfilled longing for home in this world so that we will never lose sight of the home offered through the baby in a manger?

A baby who did not arrive announcing, "I am home," but rather came, hand extended, asking each of us for the pleasure of walking us home to a place we will never have the slightest desire to run away from.

I have said many times about the mountains, "I am home." Maybe more than I have ever called any place home. And that is certainly influenced to some degree by place. By sweet, majestic geography.

But I have also said the mountains are where I most clearly hear the voice of God. A voice I hear clearer there than I have ever heard any voice say it: "you are loved and seen and safe; you belong."

I hear that voice say, "My Father's house has many rooms.... I am going there to prepare a place for you." (John 14:2-3)

Is it a paradox of sorts. I live by myself within walls that look less fancy than any walls I've ever lived within (excepting for those years of living in tents 😊🤷‍♂️), and yet, I feel as close to home as I've ever felt.

Age I'm sure has something to do with that. And wisdom. A wisdom that doesn't have me accepting the reality of my own mortality, but rather a wisdom that has me coming to terms with the truth that I haven't spent as much of my life running away from home as I've spent running toward it.

Maybe it's just now I've come to see it so clearly. The hand of Christmas. The hand without a home come to lead me home.

I am not wishing for that hand to take me today; I have plenty of work still left to do here. Work I long to do, God willing.

But less of that work than ever has me searching for home, for Christmas came to tell me I will never find it here.

It is certainly a nostalgic song, but these days when I hear the lyrics, "I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams," I think of a truth deeper than nostalgia. I think of a God who saw me longing for home - longing for peace, belonging, and love - and sent Jesus to say, "I will be your home."

Maybe on our march to Bethlehem, you’re carrying the same longing as the voice in the song. The same longing I have had. Maybe you, too, are searching for home. The good news is that Christmas is an invitation to come home—not just physically, but spiritually.

Christmas is forever God with us, God holding our longings, God leading us home to Him.

Christmas.

Home.