Home

I was told recently during a conversation about transplanting, that you should move to people, not to place. This statement keeps peeking itself around random corners here in Kansas City, winking at me with a sneaky little twinkle in its eye; here in middle America, here where the land is flat and one camps on mowed grass with a big black plastic tube running through the campsite. Here. Kansas City.

I have lived in a lot of different places, a lot. A lot of epically beautiful places actually. I could regale tales for endless hours of things my eyes have beheld from Thetis Island, British Columbia to Novgorod, Russia. You would hardly believe me. You would hardly even believe the places that I have seen, the mountains, the stars, the rivers, the oceans, the glacier headwaters, the palaces, the paintings. I nearly lose my breath just thinking about it because beauty is not something I take for granted. There is much that I do take for granted, much that I squander, but beauty is not one of them, not for one single second. I live for it. I long for it. And the Lord has shown me so much of it. He has held me and fed me on the movement of water. And oh how I needed it after growing up in inner-city America, nearly swallowed whole by decay and ugliness. I needed it more than I could have ever known. He takes such good care of me. I hear His voice so clearly in those places. He restores my soul. His presence is free, easy, and uninhibited by the hospitality of beauty. And then I try to make it my home. My heart hovers and searches for a beautiful place to plant my roots and be unmoved, but it finds none.

Sometimes I feel like the baby Robin in a children’s book I have read a nearly infinite amount of times to the various children of my life. A bird pops out of its egg while its mom is out getting food. It hops around from animal to animal asking, “Are you my mother?” to which they replay, “No silly, I’m not you’re your mother, I am a cat, etc.” And then theres me, hopping around from place to place asking, “Are you my home?” “No silly, I’m not your home, I’m just a place.” I have tried to make them all my home, but they are not.

And so, for now, here, Kansas City is my home. My eyes roam the streets looking for a beautiful place to rest their gaze, and they are not disappointed. No, there are breathtaking landscapes in unsuspecting places. I find myself ushered into the easy presence of God, like a flowing river, by the interior landscapes of the extraordinary people around me. And my prayer is that all the beauty I have seen would become apart of me, that I can open my chest cavity and out will pour the Moyie River and you will also know what Gods voice sounds like while standing in its mighty current. After all, creation is good, but the image of God in humanity is very good.