“Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
My three daughters are all grown now and have beautiful families of their own – making me a proud grandmother eight times over! But not too long ago one of them told me, after a visit taking her own children back to my mother’s home, the home where I was raised, that going “home” made her feel happy. The thing that remained the strongest for her was the smell of coffee.
My father died a few years ago and so now it is my mother and oldest brother who live in and care for our family home. The one thing you can always count on from before sunup until long after the sun has gone to shine on some other part of our world is that there will be a warm, aromatic pot of coffee ready and waiting to greet you.
The aroma wafts through the house and whether conscious of it or not it’s like a silent siren reminding you that this is a safe zone. For most of my family the scent of coffee in my birth home is like the horns that blow when a tornado is coming, and you know you have found the a spiritual corollary to same sort of physical safety you would find in a FEMA Storm Shelter within that home.
Tornados come to all our lives here and there, hit and miss. At times, it may feel as though our entire lives have become tornados. How we weather them greatly depends on if we remember the home within ourselves. Our original beauty. Who God made us to be and what dream he holds for us.
When we lose sight of that dream, stop asking, stop imagining, we step out of the home of ourselves – our authentic selves, and begin taking on battles that are not meant for us. Not all good works, for example, are meant for us to take on.
The taking on of what is not ours to take on is a major cause of burnout. Not knowing the Home of Me that God created within ourselves will cause us to not know where to say a joyful “YES” and when to say a humble “NO”. We must listen closely to the heartbeat of God for ourselves to make sure we are answering the world’s need from our true Home. Our original beauty.
Childhood is when we are most in touch with that dream, when we are most free to explore with our wild imaginations. As we age, most of us judge our wild imaginations and tell ourselves to “be practical”. Watch what culture tells us we are supposed to have and do, rather than what our God-designed hearts long for.
As Howard Thurman said, “Don’t ask what the world needs; ask what brings you full alive because what the world needs is you fully alive.” Not burned out.
You can start by asking yourself what sort of siren, as in my daughter’s case with coffee, takes you back to that tender age when you were still free to be curious and imagine wildly. To live from your the Home of Me.
Love, your sister along the journey,
k
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