There is no place like home, it’s true. There is a familiar comfort in a cozy corner or books arranged systematically in a way no other human soul could understand or the steam rising from a freshly baked loaf cooling on the counter. But sometimes home isn’t home enough. It’s unexplainably lonely and cold and quiet, even as the joyful shouts of children smother your thoughts and you shuffle around with three layers of your husband’s socks. Just me?

How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord Almighty! My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young— a place near your altar, Lord Almighty, my King and my God. Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you.

Psalm 84:1-4

This morning, after a mess and tangle of extra limbs in my bed and water requests before I opened my eyes, I remembered my home. I put the water on to boil, measured the coffee extra strong, and gave my littlest ones cereal in bowls with milk that I mentally prepared to clean up off the floor because they wanted to share a chair. Muscle memory pre-heated the oven to 460, because I have a hunch my oven runs cold. I formed the dough while the hot water rested, then rested the dough while I ground the coffee.

And, I thought of home. It’s a refuge I know well, but a place I have never lived. It’s the home God made for me and where my heart rests its head sometimes without my body fully participating. And it feels so desperately far from where I am. I sang the words with my winter-cold voice and it cracked extra as I achieved a level above the din of hide-and-seek madness circling three rooms.

I wanna be in Your presence, I wanna be near Your heart
I wanna know You’re close even when I’m feeling far
I don’t want what this world would offer, I want the living God
‘Cause there’s no place better than where You are

from Caroline Cobb’s “No Better Place”

I poured fluid ounces of meticulously heated water over coffee grounds and I cried. “Do I?” The thought surprised me, like reaching deep back into the freezer for a chocolate long hidden only to turn around to meet a child’s curious gaze. Shame and love warred for a moment– and I paused, wondering what my exposure would produce in me. I sang again, believing that singing my love for home would remind my heart where I belonged.

As I prepare for advent this year, I’m listening. I’m listening to Howard Thurman and Tish Harrison Warren and Fleming Rutledge. I am listening to old saints and seekers, monks and martyrs. And I am yearning with them for home. I am believing with them that Light has come, will come and is a Light that cannot be overcome. This is the Light that illuminates my true home. My yearning for this home feels fragile– wrapped as it is in my human understanding.

As I listen to others, I also hear my own condemnation. No matter how much I know, how many times the Spirit convicts, how often I face the facts of spiritual failure in my own life, I cannot accomplish my own mending. The ripped garments of my choosing can only be repaired with the torn veil of the Temple and the broken flesh of a Savior. And, those tiny words formed in a question hidden in the noisy kitchen chaos this morning, beckoned me, “come.”

Come, child. Come sit inside my mending. Come repent and rest. Come without all your defenses and reasons. Just come be in this Light and know that the exposure allows you to see, actually see the home I’ve made for you. Be here. Be with me. Sit with me. Listen to me. Come, child. Listen to the stories I tell of a world I made right, a world I am setting to right, a world I am actively mending by the blood of my Son, Jesus.

Warren writes about the prophet Isaiah pairing repentance and rest (Isaiah 30:15) and how it might seem curious at first. We might assume that turning from sin is work. It makes sense, because resisting temptation is work. But, in our turning we are also accepting the joy of the true work accomplished. In Christ, our repentance is not work but freedom. In Christ, we walk through an open door to be both fully exposed and fully at rest. Home. Not a home with dusty corners or shadows or shame. The home we have in Christ is rest and my body relaxes into a deep and yearning sadness to be fully arrived mind, body and soul. There is no better place.

Now, I return to the hide-and-seek madness as we prepare for Sabbath. A little one will sit on my hip as I vacuum and another will keep me company on the kitchen floor while I clean and bake. I will tend the sick one with sips of Sprite and listen as another regales me with tales of the worlds inside her books. I will share elbow space with my partner as we set to the tasks of the day. And I pray all day I will hear the refrain, “there is no better place” and think of the invitation into the Lord’s presence somehow, mysteriously, in the midst of it all.