This past weekend, we’ve been on the hoof again. Another out-of-town wedding, another lovely, beautiful time. It is so good to be able to celebrate the joy and commitment of dear friends, especially friends you’ve known practically forever. I was trying to explain to Beangirl just how long I’ve known the bride in question, and it utterly boggled her mind. The bride and I were camp counsellors together as teenagers, but how on earth could Beangirl’s mum ever have been sixteen? But then, that’s how it is. The pre-maternal mother is an imaginary creature, of course. I can just about imagine my mum before I came along, but I can’t erase my sisters from the frame. Someone’s got to be holding her hand. How could she have walked down the street without any of us? How is that possible? And when I try to jump back to before Dad came along, I might as well be imagining someone else altogether. I find myself picturing mini-skirts, bad enormous sunglasses (sorry, Mum) and well, nothing. Or maybe just a character in a book who shares biographical similarities with my mum because I can’t quite imagine my mum as my mum before she was a mum.
It’s like imagining your home without you. You can try, and you know it is out there, but it isn’t quite real, is it?
For us, being away from home the past few days has been lovely and tiring, too. The way it always is with small children. On the whole, they have been great. A few bumps and grumps, but they tend to travel well. Plum has been the trickiest one. Sleeping in a strange place and being surrounded by unfamiliar people and SOUNDS. Goodness, it makes sense he’s been a little quirky. But we’re taking the extra cuddle demands in shifts and trying to ease the path with as much gentleness as we can muster. And with cobbled together bits and pieces of our usual routine. Like making dinner together even though we are staying in a friend’s apartment. Like stories at bedtime. And going to church on Sunday morning.
Yesterday morning started early, as mornings with little ones tend to, but somehow we weren’t quite ready to head out to face the day until well after worship at most of the local congregations had already started. With a little Internet hunting, the Spouse found us a congregation that met at 10:30am and then again at noon in a local community centre. Or so we thought. Actually, the service ran from 10:30 to noon. Oops. When we arrived with a healthy bit of wiggle room before the noon service, we were most definitely ridiculously late. And welcomed.
The Spouse and Plum (sleeping) were ushered into the sanctuary space, and the bigger kids and I were taken upstairs to join the Sunday School kids. The storytelling there was long over, but we were quickly brought up to speed and settled in chairs at one end of a very long, very messy table. (I suppose that last bit might be part of why it felt like home.) The leaders learned my kids names right away, found us paper, paint and pots of glue, glittery foam cut-outs, googly eyes, jingle bells and cotton wool. All this to express the Good Shepherd, of course. Blue sat next to six-year-old Doris who had fantastic beaded braids in her hair, and she rattled them in his direction so he could have a listen. Beangirl found some glitter pens and made a marvellous drawing of herself perched in a mighty tree. She said it was a refuge and a fortress. Beautiful.
Now, this congregation is about a million theological and ecclesiastic miles away from home for us. Our home church is very formal. We sing old-school hymns with an organ, pray with read responses and our sermons are brief, while our pews and traditions very long. This congregation, as I mentioned, meets in a community centre. They sit on borrowed stacking chairs and they sing repeating choruses. They say Amen an awful lot during the prayers. They didn’t know us or expect us and we didn’t know them, but we were welcomed as if we’d come home.
This was a home we didn’t imagine, one we did nothing to create, but home it was nevertheless. Home was offered, even though we were just passing through, because our greater home is in God. We’re all pilgrims passing through, every Sunday, regardless of where we are. It is good to be reminded of that. I’m glad that yesterday morning my kids could experience that first-hand. And I’m glad for Doris’ hair beads and glitterpens and handfuls of cookies for Plum when he woke up and mugs of hot tea. And a place to worship away and at home on Sunday morning with the people of God.
