When I was a kid, I remember rides on these country roads, past rolling farm lands, feeling like the mountain-hedged horizon and too-close sky were trapping me in a life I often-enough wished was different than it was.  It’s the first I can remember feeling really claustrophobic.

As a college student, still a kid, experiencing my first tastes of independence and unwritten future days, in these same rural towns and mountain backdrops, I began to see this landscape as beautiful and brimming with promise of adventure and escape.

In the years after college, as we settled in a decidedly non-rural, non-mountainous area, I often longed for the opportunity to be back here, free from the chaos and congested roads and city skylines.

Then, ten years ago, we came back, and slowly the perceptions from my childhood and college years merged, though not due to the outward appearance of the place, but due to a more intimate knowledge of the place itself.  I can ride along the roller-coaster roads and find peace and rest.  When I see the mountain vistas, I can breathe deeper than in just about any other place.  But I also feel more trapped by this place than I ever have before.  I look around me and see lost hopes and buried dreams.  As out of place as I have felt my whole life, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as out of place as I do here and now.  While our culture and our churches preach belonging and acceptance (for different reasons), I have never felt less welcome when I step out my proverbial, and at times literal, door.

I have spent my life searching for a place I could call home, with all of the warm fuzzies and unconditionals that should come with it.  I have looked at the greener grass on the other side of the fence and thought, if only.  But I’m being reminded lately that though this longing for a perfect home is right and good, the answer for it isn’t to be found in this life. To achieve a perfect home, you can simply check this out to ensure the safety and security of your house. With every disappointment and dashed hope, I am forced to remind myself that His love is better than everything this life is or could be, and that His love should evoke praise even when this life makes it clear that there are many good things that it can never be.