Found…

I am homesick for a place I am not sure even exists. One where my heart is full. My body loved. And my soul understood. Melissa Cox

My life was a wandering; I never had a homeland. It was a matter of being constantly tossed about, without rest; nowhere and never did I find a home. Jan Amos Komenský

Deep inside I have this longing for home. Whatever and wherever home may be to me here and now, there is a desire to return to what I was designed for. The familiarity, the companionship, the comfort, the belonging of home produces an ache inside me like I have wandered too far and can’t find my way back. The returning that I have to other lovers, the things I do in order to fill the void inside – that constant pull and striving – is because I have lost my way.  

I was designed for the familiarity and intimate inclusion in God’s love, but I have found myself distanced from it, even unfamiliar with it now. 

I was designed to be included in the companionship God shares as Father, Son and Spirit, but I have been estranged from it. 

I was designed for the comfort of safety, security, value, and worth within the Perfect Love God experiences, but I have found myself alone and often afraid – far away from love. 

I was designed to belong with God and to be included in His plans and purposes, with one heart, one mind, one purpose (Philippians 2:1-2), but I am completely lost from all who He is and what He is doing. 

Still, the longing to return to this home of intimacy and inclusion, where I would be fully and lovingly embraced by God, tugs at my soul. There is something strangely familiar with this concept of home, it seems. It’s a sadness, or a loneliness, as though something deep cries out of my soul to be remembered. Something I was designed for. I know this is where I belong, within His love. This is home for my whole being. It is why I continue the search. 

I believe in that ultimate place, in God’s presence, where one day I will be home, but until I get there – a journey out of my control – Christ comes and lives within me, 

“I pray that…he may strengthen you…so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith…that you…[will be] established in love” (Ephesians 3:16-17, NIV).  

Everything about who He is as God is Love, dwells within me, He settles in, and makes my heart His dwelling place. He makes His home deep within. In being at home within me, He is awakening in me what it is like to be home in that one-day place. He is gradually redefining love within me. He is healing me of broken love. He is redeeming, restoring, returning, renewing, all that has been lost between us. The love I should have always known and lived inside of is being bought again to me, awakened within my soul, by His living within.

What makes Heaven home, is living in the presence of Love, and until I get there, Love instead comes to live within me. What He does within me gives me a glimpse of Heaven. And as He does what He does within, it is a coming home for my soul. I begin to return to the place where I was designed – in Love, within the embrace of God is Love. God’s is a love where I feel I am home; it is the love need that is satisfied as I live in His presence, where He is, and where He lives in me. 

With only a glimpse of this beginning to form in my life, I cannot yet verbalise or describe what I have begun to feel. But perhaps it is like the story in the beautiful movie, August Rush

Maxwell “Wizard” Wallace, houses street orphans and runaways and employs them to play music on the streets while taking a large cut of their tips. He has Evan in his care – a child runaway from an orphanage – who has this insatiable inner calling, urged on by the music he hears all around him to look for his parents who through a series of sad incidents are unaware of his existence. The Wizard discovers Evan’s musical potential and takes him on as his prodigy, giving him the name August Rush. One day, sitting together, the Wizard asks Evan to close his eyes and to think, if you could be anything in the whole wide world what it would be? Evan barely thinks for a moment. He already knows. It’s inside of him. It is what his deepest longing is. It is what he lives for – and he answers almost immediately with the word, 

found. 

He longs to be found. He longs to belong and to know that those who gave him life are looking for him and want him to be with them. That somehow they just got lost from each other and will not give up until they are together found.

Our boy, who came to live with us when he was 17, had no knowledge of his mum or her family, other than that she had died when he was 3 years of age. He had been raised by his dad and aunty and had been told very little of this other part of his life. His dad passed away, and he came as a refugee to New Zealand. Into his 20’s he began a Facebook search to try and find out any little piece of information about his mum’s side of the family. He wanted answers to so many questions he had about who he was. After no luck the first time, he was encouraged again a few years later to do another serious search for them. Unexpectedly, yet almost immediately, came emotional reply after reply, when one family member recognized a photo he posted on Facebook, and the news spread quickly to the rest. Within hours of this photo being recognized, the family made contact with him and told him those precious words his soul had been longing to hear, we have been looking for you. Since the time he had left with his dad, this family had been searching for him and he never knew it. He rang my husband, burst into tears and cried, I found them! They had found him and he had found them. The sense of belonging, that he had not been abandoned, that they wanted him, that he had a place and a people who loved him, and had never given up hope of finding him, was so overwhelming it took him a while to begin to comprehend it all. But the impact was incredible.

Like the sense of home, this feeling of being found speaks deeply to our souls. We have gotten lost. Sin has ripped us away from the One who gave us life and has orphaned us. In this place of lost, we are constantly empty and searching, longing to find some one, some place, or some thing that will make us feel like we have been found, that we belong, we are wanted, we fit. Though we have gotten lost, we have never been lost to God. When we finally are awakened to it, being found is our resting place. Like the deep soul sigh that breathes the word, finally. Within the embrace of God’s love we find our belonging and our fit and our home. The emptiness, the searching, the questions about our identity and who we are, are answered by His deeply fulfilling love as we allow Him to love us.

Continued in next week’s blog…

I did not understand…

Though grief has changed it shape, it still remains. Things are calmer now. Years have passed… 

The memory of losing our first son, well into the second trimester of my pregnancy, continues to this day as guarded treasure stored deep within, in a place that contains no other memory as precious as this. It is wrapped carefully within a treasure chest that is opened from time to time to recall, and only ocassionally now, would it of itself unlock, and spill its contents in moments unexpected.

I didn’t understand. 

Perhaps, if you were of the fatalistic kind, you would have said I had set myself up. From the earliest memories I have, I had wanted to be a mum. I studied and worked only to time-fill until it was the ‘right’ time. I sought positions in post-natal care and children’s wards to gain the experience and knowledge I needed to be ‘qualified’. I collected baby clothes and nursery items in preparation…

You can imagine my fall.

I lay in the darkness of the night after coming home from the emergency centre, and began the process of contemplating my state. My dream gone, my womb empty, my little boy lost. Nothing could’ve prepared me for the grief experienced, and the rollercoaster emotions that were to follow in the days, months and years ahead. I had lost a little boy, I had lost a dream, and we were unable to conceive another.

I recall that at first there was numbness. The loss had not yet taken root. The reality had not sunk in. I remember the Doctor commenting how calm I was and asking the question after having completed his examination, if this baby was planned – wanted – or not?! Callous or ignorant of grief, I don’t know, but his professional observation and insinuation was grossly incorrect. 

Following the numbness came excruciating heart pain, of such intensity that I did not know how to express my grief having never before experienced its ferocity. Heart pain became the constant. Tears were replaced by anger for a time and then would come flooding back again, unharnessed. I bargained, I pleaded, I made promises to God above. I sought His favour in the hope that He would have mercy on me. I was confused – the answers to the question, why? were left hanging in the air.

But into that first night following my loss, came unexpected words spoken. Words of the kind that are not heard with ears, yet nevertheless the clarity and source were never doubted. They were heard by my heart and mind. Spoken directly to my soul. 

You are greatly loved by God

I did not hear an expression of sympathy, “I’m so sorry this has happened”. Neither did I hear words of hope, “Do not fear. Your home will be full of boys one day”. I heard only, “you are greatly loved…”

It would be years before I would understand the comfort and the love expressed by the Speaker of these words. I had too many lies to hear the real sweetness of them, but none-the-less they remained ‘heard’ – and challenged often – all throughout my years of loss and longing. 

I thought God had forsaken me. That His love had failed to be all that I thought it should be and do. I had condemning thoughts of the nature that accused me of doing something wrong that had caused the failure of my baby boy reaching full term. I thought I was cursed for “cursed is the barren woman”. My mind considered that this was punishment for wrong behaviour or lack of devotion. I felt like my life was just a toy to be played with – one moment as a favoured toy, the next to be pushed aside. I felt alone and left. Basically, when it all was stripped away, I believed that God was cruel. I did not believe I was greatly loved. I did not understand.

And all the while I was angry, fighting and accusing God, through my confusion and hurt, through grief and heartache, God was drawing me into a deeper understanding and experience of His love for me. It certainly wasn’t overnight, the many lies had to be confronted and disbanded. Though I had an upbringing where I was told that God was a loving God, and that He cared for me, the heartache I felt and the confusion that followed, challenged and often opposed all I had been taught. 

I had to learn through pain that losing a child and being ‘barren’ didn’t mean I had sinned and was being punished – God’s love is not vindictive, nor does it condemn. The thoughts that constantly harrassed me that I was cursed because I couldn’t conceive were false – God’s love does not curse. When I thought that a child was the only thing that would fill the empty gap, and that it was the treasure I longed for, I began the journey of learning that only God’s perfect love can deeply satisfy and fill the needs of this heart. The confusion I felt month after month, and the up and down emotions, all screamed to me that He didn’t care, that He wasn’t there when I needed Him most, needed to be replaced with truth, even in the toughest moments of accusing thoughts and ambused feelings. Because though I had heard the verses, “I will have compassion on You”, “I love you”, and “I will never leave You”, they were words read only, foreign to my heart that did not yet believe that God loved me. 

The gap between the love that I had read about God and my love experienced in this world had been too great. The two could not mesh because the first was a perfect love offered, but the other was a broken love experienced, and experience is a great teacher, though not always true or wise. The gaps in my understanding of God meant that the lies I had about Him were felt inside as greater than the truth I had been told about, and knew of Him, so I could not mesh who He really was with the things I felt. I believed and lived out of the lies because they spoke louder than the truth in my reality.

Over the years as God invited me into a deeper experience of His Love, He began tearing down the lies, rebuilding new beliefs, and giving me the eyes to see that His truth had to be believed over my lies and feelings. 

It needed to be a whole new understanding. 

This understanding needed to be different to what I had before that was confused, and ambiguous and constantly shifting depending on my circumstances. The intellectual understanding and experience of love I had, was not enough to keep my heart and mind secure when this grief hit. My eyes had been clouded by broken ideas of love, but the desire God had for me was that I have clarity – that my perspective and understanding and depth of insight, be free from uncertainty and doubt. I can really only say that it was and continues to be just the beginning…

Concerning God’s unfathomable and great love, Saint Paul says, 

“And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is” (Ephesians 3:18, NLT).

“I pray that your love will overflow more and more, and that you will keep on growing in knowledge and understanding. (Philippians 1:9, NLT).

I love the dictionary definition that describes the words, “to understand”as, “to be familiar with”.In this context, the word “familiar” is to be so comfortable and closely intimate with God – to know that when I see His love expressed I can say, “Oh yeah, that’s God” as if it were just the usual thing to be seen. “Familiar” removes all ambiguity and doubt. To understand His love is to have the familiarity and complete assurance that He is a faithful God who is as He says He is. When He says, “I will never leave You”, He will never, ever leave me. He will not walk away. He will not quit on me. He will not abandon me. He is there. Period. The same is true of all the aspects of His love. When He says His love never fails, it never ever does. Period. When He declares He is for us not against us, then that is exactly true of Him. Period.

Today though my treasured past, is past, and the grief has calmed, the journey has been walked, I am left with this deeper understanding, and with a deeper experience, that I am greatly loved by God. I do not want to experience loss and grief again, I would not ask for it, but I do treasure the intimate understanding that this experience led me to. I would not go back to the shaky, confused place I was before, because the understanding I have now is more precious to me. The safety and surety of God, His presence with me always, His unfailing love, His precious promises made, are all treasures that I value. And I am in the place of choosing as my foundation – love. It is the Rock I am building my life on. It is a new understanding…


Continued in next week’s blog…