Finding Home in Our Good Shepherd

*You can read the previous post in this series here.

For this world is not our permanent home;

we are looking forward to a home yet to come.

–Hebrews 13:14

While navigating the wilderness of church trauma, our family of six lived in a diverse, low-income neighborhood in the middle of one of the richest counties in America. We chose to rent instead of buy and lived at the mercy of a landlord. From a young age, our kids grew accustomed to church friends commenting on both the small size and ‘ghetto’ location of our town home. At one point I enrolled our oldest in a homeschool program at a Christian private school. One of the other mothers pressed to get our boys together to do a school project—until she found out where we lived. “Do you live over in such-and-such neighborhood? . . . . Well we live at 83d and Nall (the rich neighborhood ten minutes down the road). I found another boy to study with my son, so we won’t be needing yours.”

Cast out by church and family, with no house to call our own, we’ve come to understand the Christian life as a sojourning life. That Jesus himself had no place to lay his head has brought comfort, yet, like every human, we’ve longed for a place to belong—a place to call home. What we so wanted from church and family has not come to pass in the way we dreamed. Along the way we’ve been tempted to believe God abandoned us as if he did not care about our hopes or happiness.

Yet, in hindsight, we see how God withheld these earthly gifts of family, church, and home to burn away our lesser longings and bring about his better vision for our lives. As writer and poet David McKelvey says: “God, your bigger purpose has always been for my greatest good, that I would day-to-day be fashioned into a more fit vessel for the indwelling of your Spirit and molded into a more compassionate emissary of your coming Kingdom. And you, in love, will use all means to shape my heart into those perfect forms.” [1] God uses any means necessary to shake away the chaff of our lesser dreams because he desires that we find our forever home in him. The process of breaking down and tearing up earthly “homes” like church and family tenderizes our hearts. God tears us down to build us up again because he loves us with an everlasting love, an unfailing kindness (Jeremiah 31:4), and desires to mold us, strengthen us, and plant us deeper into Him (Col. 2:6).

The years of living in our tiny town home surrounded by government subsidized housing and frequent police visits due to domestic disputes and drugs shook and shattered our lesser hopes. Our hearts grew more compassionate as we learned to invest “all hope in the one hope that will never come undone or betray those who place their trust in it.”[2] Laying down and taking up our lesser hopes is a never-ending struggle, yet our grip grows looser in time. After eleven years of gardening our narrow strip of ghetto grass, hanging out with our neighbors on doorsteps framed with broken railings, and chasing the neighborhood kids around the green space out back, our family began to feel settled. Then one sunny, fall afternoon as the oak tree in our front of our home shed its brilliant orange leaves, our fifty-year-old landlord passed away suddenly from heart disease. We had no idea if we’d be allowed to remain in our home or get kicked out in a matter of weeks. When we received a letter giving us four weeks to find a new place to live, our four kids broke into sobs, saying they didn’t want to leave.

God uproots and replants, tears down to build up—this is grace.

In our desperate search for a new place, we stumbled across a 1970’s time capsule owned by a hard-as-nails 90-year-old woman named Billie. Having weathered the Great Depression and the deaths of two husbands and several children, I’ve never met a fiercer human being or a better landlord. Then just two weeks ago Billie fell over dead while gardening in her back yard. Her death startled us with the reality that none of us knows the day or hour of our last breath. None of us knows when Jesus will snatch us up and bring us home. Billie’s death triggered familiar feelings of instability and uncertainty. How long will we be able to stay in this home-that’s-not-our-home?

In this new season of insecurity, I’ve found myself lusting after cute little bungalows and Cape Cods in our neighborhood. Over the years I’ve learned to reframe my desire to own a physical home as a longing for Jesus. When family forsakes and church is unsafe, he is always there, walking beside me through the valleys, the green meadows, and there and back again. Because Jesus is my shepherd, I lack no good thing. His goodness and mercy pursue me all the days of my life and my home is Him. In between the already and not yet, one thing I ask from Jesus, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in His house, gazing on the beauty of the Good Shepherd who keeps me and holds me onto my faith.[3]

Shepherd True[4]

I was wandering and weary
When my Saviour came unto me;
For the ways of sin grew dreary,
And the world has ceased to woo me;
And I thought I heard Him say,
As He came along His way,