Dad here; where is “home”? Not the brick and mortar building that the mortgage company no doubt owns more of than you do anyway, but that place where you can reconnect and recharge?
Is it in a few minutes of stillness and solitude in the evening? Or in boisterous community around a kitchen table? Is it in walking or running or biking through streets or through hills? Is it in listening to music? Or, better yet, making your own, singing in church perhaps? Or in something else entirely? Cross stitch, feeding the homeless, volunteering at the shelter, it matters not that your way may or may not be my way.
Recognize that you were designed uniquely, to have ways, even amid the cacophony of today’s world, to find restoration. You were designed to, every so often, just come home. So open your eyes. Search your heart. You have, no doubt, already been shown how.
Okay, so what do we do?
Think back on times when you most felt God’s peace, however you envision Him to be. That you have experienced this in particular ways, in particular places, in particular activities, means He has spoken, directly to you. You have been shown the way. Now, you simply must choose to do follow it, consistently and often, but with keeping an open mind and a clear head for the connection that is waiting for you.
What’s mine, you ask? Sometimes it’s just watching my dogs be dogs, fulfilling their particular roles as they were created to do. Other times, it’s in the still small voice amidst the roar of the wind inside a motorcycle helmet,enhanced by the gyroscopic motion of the wheels and the synergy of bike and rider as one, leaning into the curves. When I add a goofy black dog to the equation, sitting on the back like she was born to be there, well, some might call it achieving nirvana.
I tend toward solitary riding, much like I prefer solitary worship. My motorcycles are the vehicles that transport me to a different experience of the world of which I would otherwise be unaware. The sensory engagement of the landscape is unparalleled in even a sport car with the top down. One smells a meal being prepared, a lawn just mown and the unseen chicken coop or the dead skunk in the distance. Subtle changes in temperature hint of the presence of a stream or old growth trees. The space inside my helmet is a place in which I can uniquely hear that voice and listen to my thoughts with a clarity that otherwise evades me.
But most often, it’s when Charlie and I are scribbling these posts, as it’s akin to riding the bike: going places while sitting still. Heavily armored while still being ultimately vulnerable. The world contracts into what you can carry on the bike, but then expands exponentially into where it can take you.
What’s yours? Recognize it for what it is, and build on it. They say that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and sometimes the way back home isn’t found as quickly either, but I assure you that, although it may be choked with weeds, that the way is still there.
You may just have to open a new road map.
