Sailing For Home

Here's what I was reading today:

"Nothing good comes easily.  You have to lose things you thought you loved, give up things you thought you needed.  You have to get over yourself, beyond your past, out from under the weight of your future.  The good stuff never comes when things are easy.  It comes when things are all heavily weighted down like moving trucks....We become who we are in these moments."

                                                                                      -Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines

Thank God that losing the things I love doesn't mean my precious family.  But giving up the things I thought I needed does mean letting go of this Beulah-land fantasy I've been harboring that all will be glittering and perfect when I arrive in the hallowed ground of The South.  And I won't lie...I still secretly hope that if I can just give up the dream, God will appear like a holy vending machine and give me the location of my choice.

So what does sailing for home mean exactly?  In terms of the atlas home means Duluth, Georgia, USA, planet earth.  But in the spiritual sense, home means something that is much harder to define.  It means letting go of the things that are (ironically) "weighting me down like moving trucks".  It means resting in the Holy Mystery and trusting that He will guide the boat.  Which, in turn, leaves me free to practice giving thanks and living presently.  I want to look out the window and see the blessing instead of the curse of more snow.  Nathan reminded me that complaining about the weather was tantamount to insisting that the Weather Giver got it wrong that day.  Yikes.

So that's what it's all about...dreaming dreams while being fully anchored in the present.  Giving thanks for my stable husband who loves me enough to not force me to sit down in the boat.  Taking joy in my precious little boy and his dreamy inner life.  In other words, peace in the center of the pull and tug of life which is slowly forming us into "who we are."