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Topic: Home (01/09/06)
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TITLE: Many Mansions | Previous Challenge Entry
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01/10/06 -
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Once he had sent the form off that anomaly still kept popping back into his mind. He looked up the definition of ‘home’ and found the meanings “a village or town; a dwelling place; one’s own house; the place of one’s dwelling and nurturing; a place, region or state to which one properly belongs; the place where one’s ancestors dwelt” included there. Even being that selective it was confusing; thank goodness they just had asked for addresses, and not homes!
The next day he asked some of his colleagues how many addresses they had had in the past ten years. There would have been no problem for them - in fact most of them would have had space to spare if they had been filling in the form. Over lunch he talked about it with a couple of friends who observed that, with the emphasis on home ownership, it would probably be impractical to have more than a couple of homes in ten years and the boxes could provide a useful indicator of stability. ‘So am I unstable now?’ he wondered.
The journey to his current home was still beset with the questions the application form had raised and Mike began to go through those abundant addresses. Three of them had related to his military service, another eight to his preparation for and involvement in the ministry of his particular church and the last one was his current one. He had indeed dwelled at each of those addresses; he felt he properly belonged in all of them at the time; they were certainly places he had known nurturing and development and, although this wasn’t among the definitions he’d remembered, he had certainly felt at home in each of them; that the people there mattered and were important to him. As he walked, almost automatically now, to his current home he thought of the countless people he had met in and around those twelve homes and felt his heart overwhelmed by love for all of them.
As he put his key in the door his thoughts seemed to summarise themselves. It may not be what society expected or even demanded; he didn’t care if it was taken to be a sign of instability. As he stepped over the threshold of his current home he recalled that, while foxes and birds had homes, the Son of Man had had no one place to lay his head (see Matthew 8:20).
Safe and comfortable in his latest home Mike let go of the expectations of society and employers and spent his prayer time giving thanks for different places he had lived and the myriad of wonderful people he had known in the past ten years. He concluded: “Thank you, Lord, for all your goodness, and especially for showing me that my home is wherever You want me to be.”
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