Boxes, boxes everywhere! How did I get so much stuff!! I thought I did the sort-discard-re-sort-discard-pack thing when I went overseas two years ago… in fact, I know I did. But in that year overseas, I seem to have collected more stuff…! And even the irrelevant things got shipped back — I wasn’t allowed to go back and pack myself, due to being on medical leave, so someone else packed me up. God BLESS them for it! But, it made for much chaos and confusion — and a bit of frustration — as I’ve unpacked. Searching for things I was sure I had, finding things I thought had been sold, and discovering things I’d thought were supposed to come back had not, in fact, made it back.

The place IS beginning to look like home, but the feeling still hasn’t come. The older I get, the more time it seems to take for a place to "feel" like home. Or maybe I’m just feeling the effects of all I’ve been through in the last couple of years, and my year-plus of living nomadic lifestyle. I’m not even sure what home’s supposed to look like any more.

But I know what it smells like. It smells like Nina’s basement apartment… mom and dad’s home the last six months of their lives.

I got back to her home last month, walked into the basement, got a good whiff of it and sighed, "aaahhh, I’m home!" Isn’t that weird? A place with such sad memories, the place where I my mom died, where I first saw her when I got home…. but it’s also the place I lived during the holidays last year. And those have become some of my most cherished memories, even though they were hard, hard times. I was so depressed and felt so without hope.

It was in the midst of that darkness that God met me, Nina and Toby carried me, the Holy Spirit enveloped me. Though I could not see Him or feel Him, I knew Jesus was there. No, I didn’t know, I just BELIEVED He was there…. I chose to believe and clung to that belief with all the strength I had left – which wasn’t much. It was either believe or die. Believe or be swallowed whole by the darkness. Believe or… or lose myself completely to the Abyss.

Perhaps that’s what home is. Perhaps that’s what the smell in Nina’s beautiful basement apartment really reminds me of.  The sweetness of being rescued by God. Sweetness that can only be fully known by believing what you cannot see or feel when all your senses are screaming that it’s over, there is no hope left.

I have many magical memories of home, but perhaps none so magical, or so packed full of hope, as last Christmas at Nina’s.  It’s a magic I’ve never known before, and didn’t know it then. The kind you cannot know unless you’ve clung to the precipice of the Abyss and, with fear throbbing through every fiber of your being, shouted at the top of your lungs, "I believe You, God!! I believe You are here, as You say You are. I believe You! I believe You love me beyond all comprehension! I believe You will rescue me! I believe You! And I refuse to ever stop believing!"

Perhaps that’s what Home is. Hope-packed magic that only God and a stubbornly willing heart can create.