A homebody on the road

My husband Jonathan drove our yellow car through the 8 a.m. Asheville, N.C., traffic this week, bound for WORLD News Group’s headquarters. Above the jingle of our Super Awesome Asheville Hipster Blow-Your-Mind Playlist, I asked him, “Will we ever get to the point in our lives where we love to travel?”

He didn’t have to think about it: He said, “No.”

We made the trip south the week after graduation on a day that happened to double as our first wedding anniversary. We ate our cake top the night before, planting the Lego man and wife back into the frosting for a final photo shoot. The cardboard Lego-sized arbor had bent considerably after a year in the freezer, and the bride’s torso had come detached from her legs, but the cake was fantastic. Bending above our mountain of packed luggage, we fed each other the customary bite before falling into delirious sleep. We had an early morning date with I-81 South. But after our work-heavy school year, we just wanted to curl up at home.

For the next two weeks I’m working in the WORLD/God’s World News office while Jonathan takes his turn at the World Journalism Institute’s annual “Backpack Journalism in a Digital Age” course. WJI, which my whole heart recommends to any serious young writer, does have a way of wearing one out. (See WJI’s Facebook page for photos from this year’s course.) So after each long day of writing, we hop into the yellow car with the Super Awesome Asheville Hipster Blow-Your-Mind Playlist and let The Beatles pipe us back to our borrowed room on the west side of the city. There, again, we fall into delirious sleep.

A couple weeks ago I worked on a series of space escape stories for WORLDkids. I shuddered as I wrote about the unflappable men and women who long to venture into space surrounded by nothing but man-made pods of tenuous habitability. Space exploration makes 300 miles on I-81 look like a walk in the garden. If someone really wanted to disrupt my life to the level of marrow, I thought, he or she should kidnap me and rocket me into space.

All my life I have met people who long to travel, to have certifiable adventures and breathe in parts of the world unfamiliar to them. But I think God made some of us with a particularly acute pain in pilgrimage. The old-fashioned word for this is “homebody.” And I, even more than my husband, was born one of these.

In one of my earliest memories, I stretch out on my mother’s bed. I feel blue inside, mysteriously restless and far from home—even in the homiest of home spots, my parents’ bedroom. “I feel homesick,” I say to my mother, confused. “Sometimes,” she says, “we are homesick for heaven.”

I think God knocks me out of my nest from time to time to remind me of this. Traveling of any kind bears down the intergalactic reality of my life: This world is not my home. I am always passing through. Home is somewhere I am still going. Home, real home, is with Him.