There's No Place Like Home

"...my soul, find rest in God; my hope comes from him." - Psalm 62:5 NIV

You may have had a place that felt like it was waiting for you. A grandmother's kitchen, a back porch at dusk, somewhere you exhaled the moment you walked in. You didn't have to explain yourself there. When it was time to leave, something in you resisted. You just knew you belonged.

The Psalmist knew that same settling, though he had to talk himself into it. He wrote, "Yes, my soul, find rest in God; my hope comes from him." (Psalm 62:5) That word yes is worth a pause. He was addressing himself the way you would a friend who keeps looking for the door, stay. Could that single word be the whole posture.

Staying is not the same as waiting. The word the New Testament uses for abiding carries the sense of remaining when leaving would seem more natural. The long stretches of silence are not evidence of absence and stillness is not emptiness. Staying is how the branch remains connected to the vine, the willingness to be where you already are.

The Bible tells of a man named Simeon, told by God's Spirit he would not die before seeing the Lord's salvation. He stayed in the temple for years, not straining, not searching, just remaining where the Spirit said to wait. When the infant Jesus was brought in, Simeon held Him and said, "...my eyes have seen your salvation." (Luke 2:30) Not arrival at something new but recognition of what the staying had pointed toward.

The writer of Lamentations sat with every grief named and then wrote, "Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope." (Lamentations 3:21) That word yet is the hinge. He stayed long enough for the hinge to turn. He wrote, "The Lord is my portion, therefore I will wait for him." (Lamentations 3:24) Home is not ahead. It's here, and the staying is what lets us see it.

We have been noticing, naming, returning. Somewhere in those returns something shifted. Could it be that the practiced returning was not preparation for a place still ahead, but was itself the slow recognition of where we already live?

The One who holds you is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you faultless and with great joy. (Jude 1:24) The long season of returning shaped the kind of person who can finally receive that. Not someone who has arrived, but one who has stayed long enough to stop looking for the door. There's no place like home, and home has been here all along. Come and see.

Prayer

Lord, we thought staying would be the hardest part. What we found instead was You, already here, already keeping us. Teach us to remain without straining, to trust the quiet more than the distance. Let our souls rest in the portion we have always had. We trust You with the staying. Amen.