A week ago I celebrated my birthday with the elder couples of Soma Tacoma. We partied like it was February 2020.
It also marked a year from our decision to move from Slovakia to Tacoma. And it felt like a turn in a journey in many ways.
In a poem called ‘Little Gidding’, TS Elliot writes about finding our “home” again after a long journey. This resonates, not primarily in a geographical sense, but rather in how it describes our journey in navigating the geography of our own hearts. I read his poem and find it describing my journey towards finding my own home in my own skin again, or perhaps for the first time.
Finding my right size. Fitting into and filling up the space allotted to me. Home.
“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.” – TS Elliott
God knows the geography of our hearts.
He is patient in guiding us in becoming who he created us to be. He writes better stories than we could write for ourselves. When he holds the pen on the page of our life, the story will be good, and every step becomes an arrival.
Thirty-three was hands down the hardest year of my adult life, at times simply a numb year of ache, sadness, loneliness, and loss. At times there was rage and resentment. But on the other side of 33, it was also a year of revealing, of becoming, of healing, of finding wholeness and finding home. Learning silence and secrecy and obscurity and waiting. Finding that right size and recognizing that shrinking back from or pushing against that right-sizedness both stem from pride. To be whole is to find a home in our story.
Many of you not in this picture have been guides or sherpas on this journey. Some of you have been Sam Gamgees as well. Thank you for carrying us along the way.
The people in this picture have been some of those Sams. Six months ago, we were able to affirm six elders to serve our church family. But aside from the joy of serving Soma together, it’s been a joy to be lead by them in this home seeking.
For our Slovak family around the country and mainly in Nitra, a year later it is still a daily grief that we have left the place you helped us make a home. We love you. V Nitre ako v nebi.
The last few weeks as I neared one year since moving to Tacoma from Slovakia, I’ve noticed a shift from the reactive to the proactive. There is the beginning of a turn, personally, in family life, and in life as a pastor, a turn from the needed picking up of pieces of that which is broken, and a turn from finding what it is we are to build. And finding the family with whom we are to build and with whom we are to be. The beginnings of home.
God knows the geography of our hearts.
He is the great cartographer because he is the great landscaper to begin with. He knows the way home. In a crazy twist, he moved into our neighborhood to dwell in us, to make us his home. It is good then to let him lead us home. There is no home apart from him. And though he leads us, it is also our good Father who will be there as we arrive.
DAWSON AND LAUREL JONES 