out of sorts

Feeling a bit out of sorts today.

Not sure why.

It's 11:30pm and I'm sitting in bed here in my basement abode with my laptop in my lap on top of the fleecy blankets keeping me warm.

The guys next door are chatting on their front porch, and the smell of their Marlboro's is drifting through my closed window. Porch chatter and cigarette smoke are the urban America equivalent of the compound laughter and cooking fire smoke that drifted through my open window in rural Uganda.

With the funny out-of-sorts feeling tonight, I resorted to a familiar vice...suspenseful/humorous crime show tv...I laughed out loud a few times, but the cackles reverberating back from the empty concrete walls quickly reminded me that my onscreen "friends" at NCIS are poor substitutes for the "been through the thick of it together" friends I used to gather with 'round the same screen to laugh and be entertained.

As I write, the tears come and I realize what the out-of-sorts feeling is...it's homesickness.

But you are home, you say. I am. I'm not.

This last Sunday at church our congregation said a tearful goodbye to a family in the church that is moving away. They were sad to go. Our community is sad to see them go. And in the prayers that we sent them off with, someone mentioned that the tears from both parties demonstrated the longing for our true home that we all feel at one time or another...our true home where there won't be any more leaving.

When I spoke at another church a few weeks ago, that church community surrounded 2 particular women in prayer that day. One of these women is probably younger than me and was headed into surgery a few days later to have a mass of unknown origin removed from her abdomen. I have learned since that this young woman had a total hysterectomy and was diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer and was to learn this last week whether the cancer had spread and how far. In our true home there will be no sickness.

We all will long for home with a big "H" for a long time, no matter where we are or who we are.

We will long to be with people we are far from, we will long for familiar sights and sounds and tastes and smells from places dear to us, we will long for sickness, death, injustice and tears to be no longer; we will long.

It's good for me to long. It's oh so heart wrenching but it's good. It's good not because of it's value as an emotional exercise, it's good not because the things that are so heart wrenching are of ANY less value...it's good because of what is at the end of the longing...it's good because it focuses my mind and heart on what's true...it's good because God promises to come back to right all wrongs and take us Home (with a big "H").

I heard a radio broadcast the other day in which the guest spoke of his disappointment with the egotism of a particular group of people - writers I believe - in their tendency to view everything in the world through the light of their own lives, that they somehow would turn every situation into a story about them. I got scared. Maybe that's me. If it is, my most sincere apologies.