Home Lies Just Ahead

Eighty-some years ago, as recorded in a history pamphlet written by my grandpa: “Four brethren of an adventurous nature decided to go west.”

The four “brethren,” members of a Mennonite church in Pennsylvania, settled their families in northern Wisconsin, on land dotted with stumps, swamps, rocks, and spindly trees—but with a rich layer of topsoil beneath. They set to work clearing and harrowing. One of those men was my great grandpa. He and his family made a home on Wisconsin’s unfamiliar, primitive soil.

Ninety-some years prior to that—back when the land was carpeted with virgin pine, as tall as silos and as wide around as tabletops—the Ojibwe called it home. The U.S. government exiled them to reservations following a treaty in 1842.

Two people groups starting over, one by compulsion, the other by choice.

My grandpa grew up in the house in Wisconsin my great grandpa built, and my mom grew up later in the very same house. She married a dashing dark-haired man from Indiana and lured him back to Wisconsin. I grew up in the home my mother and that dashing young man created, in the same house my mother and my grandfather and my great grandfather lived before me.  

When I close my eyes, I picture that home:

• laughter and warmth
• ice cream on Sunday evenings after church
• brown-eyed, dirty children
• cows’ slobbery mouths guzzling hay
• the tan leaves of cornstalks against a pink sky
• a treehouse, worn by weather
• Mom’s work-roughened hands immerged in suds, dishes clinking

I left that home a year ago to marry my own dashing dark-haired man from Maryland.

Sometimes when he is gone, I stare at empty walls and want to be home again. I want to curl in my corner of the couch, flattened by many sittings, and hear my brothers walk in the door, home from work. I want to clear the cupboard while my mom loads the dishwasher she finally got, telling her my life’s problems and hearing her laugh at my stupid jokes. I want to lie in my bed in a bedroom frigid from Wisconsin’s cold winter and hear the clink of the kettle as dad makes his hot cereal down in the kitchen. I want to sit at the table after church, eating ice cream while my family talks.

I am not in exile, as the Ojibwe were. I came here by choice.

And sometimes I know here that old feeling of home. I know it:

• when the sun rises behind the windmills and my husband texts me to step outside and look.
• when I take the field path past the alfalfa, green as emerald.
• when my husband and I curl up in bed and read together.
• when I feel him inside me in my most intimate spot.
• when I think of the peach-sized child growing inside me. Like a peach, a baby app tells me, its body has begun to grow fuzz.

Two-thousand-some years ago, another baby developed peach fuzz in his mother’s belly. Exiled by choice from his heavenly home and, when he grew up, from his earthly one, he must have gotten homesick as he traveled the roads of Galilee. He would have remembered the carpenter’s shop, the smell of sawdust, his mother baking bread. Did he also remember his Father’s smile, the angels’ warm laughter, and long to return to his only true home?

From Adam to Abraham to Ruth, exile is a common theme in the Bible. We are exiles, every creature. Exiled from love, from God, from Spirit, from grace. That peach-fuzzy exile that grew up and died made a way for us to return to our only true home, the one God intended for us from the foundation of the world.

Exile, that feeling of emptiness we all know in our most intimate heart, is a gift. As an old hymn written by Adelaide Anne Procter says, “I thank Thee more that all our joy is touched with pain; that shadows fall on brightest hours, that thorns remain, so that earth’s bliss may be our guide, and not our chain.”

See the corn leaves over there, against a pink sky? Home lies just ahead.

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This post was first published in my column in Anabaptist World.