Tourist Trap

Longing for Home

All my life it seems that I have been a tourist, a visitor to places I can not call my own . . .

Those are the opening lyrics to the song that I wrote years ago called Preacher Man. Here now, in this time and place, I am reminded that those words still ring true for me.

No matter where I’ve been, where I’ve visited, or where I have made my residence, I have always felt like an outsider. Vacations have always been hard too, I realize now.

In Mississippi, where I grew up, I was the weird, nerdy, overly creative Mennonite kid whose parents were from the North. There is much about my childhood that resides in me, and I would say the rhythm of the majority of the words within pulse in time to those hot summer days beneath the southern pines.

University found me making friends but still feeling separate somehow, and where many of them are today, I do not know. Their lives have moved far beyond me. Most if not all of those connections have fallen away.

My first sojourn in the city found me in a community still feeling a deep sense of isolation and loneliness until I finally bowed to the inevitable call of the wilderness.

I still returned to the city for work and connections but found it wanting, pursuing relationships that were safely out of reach. Strange to think that in living alone in a cabin (albeit in a community) away from the many peopled city brought us together.

Suddenly, you appeared midst the ice and snow on that blind curve in the middle of nowhere in your warm coat and red beret. So began our journey together, and my continued seeking to understand what it means to belong.

It seems I have spent my life watching the circles of others and wondering what life is like within their embrace, knowing that, but for a brief moment when I happen to pass by, I will never know.

There is you and I, but the decisions we have made seem to have come with the cost of loneliness, and our family is different than the norm.

How do we strengthen our circle and widen it to encompass those around us?

So many goodbyes. So many whose lives have moved on from my own.

It is hard to know which connections to hold on to, which new ones to begin. Which of the old relationships that seem to resonate in my brain pulsing with memories do I need to let go so that I can be at peace and enter into new circles?

I wonder if I will ever truly feel at home here. The great Christian rocker Larry Norman titled one of his albums Only Visiting This Planet and there is the truth to that. I am only a sojourner here. “This world is not my home. I am only passing through” goes the old gospel song. But in the meantime, in the years that I have left, will I always be discontented? Will I always feel like I do not belong?

Here, now, in this hard place around this lonely table outside under gray skies in a city where I once lived that never felt completely like home and upon my return feels even less so I hear the cry of blue jays screaming, “Thief! Thief!” I think of the years I have left and those that have been stolen from me which I will never get back. How much do I strive for, and how much do I simply leave alone as I move through life led by what gives me joy? All of this is gift, is it not?

Like leaving on that day to make music for friends, finding you standing there on a slippery slope, unaware that on another day not too long after, you would hold me in your arms and say, “Welcome home.”