There I am again...

² There on the poplars
we hung our harps,

³ for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

⁴ How can we sing the songs of the LORD
while in a foreign land?

-Psalm 137

I don't really know where to say I am "from." When I'm supposed to list a hometown on some internet profile, I never know what to put. The town I was born in? The place where I went to high school? Or the town I just moved from? None of them feel quite like home to me. At holidays, when friends are purchasing plane tickets and arranging road trips across the country, they are heading to the place they call home. When I arrange trips to visit my family, especially as time creates a greater distance between me and the place I left when I graduated from high school, I see it as an obligatory visit...maybe almost a reminder to my parents that I exist.

It's always been this way to some degree, though. My sisters and I never pretended to fit in at holidays and get-togethers with my step dad's relatives. It's sort of funny. This year I introduced myself to my step-cousin's husband as if we'd never met. He said, "I know you, I'm Angela's husband...we've been married for years." Whoops. (I lose track sometimes of who is still married or divorced or...whatever).

Lately, though, this feeling has translated itself into an intense (and weird) longing to head West. I started wanting to move to Washington and live in a trailer in the woods. At first I saw it as a way to have my own into-the-wild, f-society, Walden pond experimental adventure. But really, at the core of it, I think my soul has been searching for home. When I watch my home movies from when I was a kid, something stirs inside my heart. "That's who I used to be...there I am again. How can I get that back?"

So much happens to the human heart. Living is a dangerous thing. But the good news is that everything that's lost can be found. What I lost is slowly coming back to me...I am slowly regaining myself. I've been wandering in the desert, but home is not far away. Home is welling up from within me like a spring. The joy of my salvation is being restored.