Come Be My Light

First, thank you everyone who wrote encouraging notes on and off the blog and for the phone call and prayer...it helped my outlook. I'm still in the painful and stiff phase of the CFS, however, my outlook seems brighter. It really did feel good to just write about it and "get if off my chest."

Since I wrote the quotes from Amy Carmichael, I have been thinking about her idea of God being our home. It's kind of funny, but not really, that that would jump off the page at me. I grew up in Everett/Lake Stevens/Mukilteo, Washington. When I return it seems foreign. Yuppies everywhere, traffic, rudeness. It's just not the same. I feel like a foreigner, a visitor or someone who doesn't belong. My adopted "home", Bellingham, where I lived from 1990 until I married...well, it's still lovely, the people are still friendly and my church family welcomes us each time we visit with open arms. I still maintain friendships with nurses, doctors and staff that I worked with and I love going back. But many things have changed and time has marched on without me. It doesn't feel like home. Where we live in CA has never quite become home. It is home...I've been here for almost 9 years, but here too, I feel like an Outsider. As my husband and I have researched different areas for re-location (we love the new friends we are making in our church family but this is not a healthy place for me to live with my asthma!), I keep wondering, "Will I find home? Where will it be?" If I think on it too long, the ideas grow in my mind. It's a slippery slope from research/planning to discontent/Cinderella thinking.

I've always told my husband that I would be happy anywhere, even if I hated it, even it if it were a cardboard box under a freeway overpass, as long as he were with me. Naturally, that wouldn't be my first choice! LOL But truly, he brings me joy and I have grown as a person because of his love. It would be foolishness to allow him to meet all my needs, or to allow any one person to meet all my needs, make me happy or bring me fulfillment.

That is why I can only ever have One True Home. I am reminded too of the verses that say that we are not of this world; this world is not our home, and I realize that I have had Home with me all along. I feel now as if I can sigh! It's a relief! It truly will not matter where I live, where we live, whether or not there is enough room or if the roof leaks. One day the trumpet will sound and "we're gonna blow this pop stand"! Until then I will grow content in my Home wherever my earthly dwelling may be.

Isn't it odd that the simplest things often take the most time and heartache to learn?

Appropriately my current reading is Come Be My Light, which is composed of letters and writings of Mother Teresa concerning her feelings of spiritual darkness through the last decades of her life. The media blew this all out of proportion, making it sound like she doubted God. In reality, she is saying, "I believe, but I don't feel." Can any one of us say that we have never felt this? She felt that this was probably "sent" to her to experience suffering as did Christ. I am not sure that I agree with that and I probably will disagree with many things she writes. I am not totally anti-Catholic, but realistically, I am Protestant for a reason and so likely there will be things I cannot agree with. I'm looking forward to hearing what she wrote and I am intrigued by her honesty in recording these thoughts. I will be reading this along with my friend from church. She is a young Mom and the hope is that our children will play together and that somehow inbetween all that we will get to talk about the book. The first time will be tomorrow, Lord willing and so I am looking forward.