Homesick?

I was just listening to one of my favorite play lists, when a familiar song made me cry for the first time...Stacie Orrico "(There's Gotta Be) More to Life." To understand why this song had such an effect on me I will have to give you background information and, in the process digress somewhat from the 'theological' tone I have sought to maintain in this blog. The truth is, I have really maintained no such tone, but somehow I fear that what I now have to say will somehow betray weakness. This fear is one of the core flaws in my make-up: the tendency to equate those things in me that are feminine with that which is weak.

Back to the song, or rather to why the song made me cry. I have now been resident in Cardiff four weeks and three days. (I seem to be counting the days. Is this because every new person I meet asks how long I have been here, or because the weight of the days begins to impress upon me the importance and irrevocability of the choice I have made in coming here?)

It all started (at least most of it) last Friday when a friend invited me out to her home for lunch and the afternoon "as long as you'd like." I met Rosa at eleven and had lunch with her, her friend Sharon, and Sharon's little one-year-old daughter. In the course of our chatting after lunch I helped the small girl walk across the room and back, eliciting the comment from her mother that I am "good with children." These words echoed oddly with me, especially in light of a similar comment from Rosa after she heard my first conversation with her five-year-old son.

After Sharon went home, Rosa and I picked up the boys at school and attended a rugby match. After the match (which her boy's team won), I shared the preparation and consumption of the evening meal with Rosa and her family. They have a relatively small house, but father, mother and four sons function well and happily together. A happy family.

This pleasant Friday afternoon and evening overshadowed a lonely Saturday, but at the time I didn't connect the two. It wasn't until a friend sat me down and made me talk on Tuesday night that I realized what had cast the shadow: a happy family. Which brings me to today, browsing a friend's facebook page, looking at the happy faces of her brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews. She comes from a family that I have long considered my secondary, back-up family, people I knew would take me in and help in any way they could if I needed it. I know and love the faces in those photos. As I looked at the pictures and thought of the love and joy in that family, my heart ached with a strange longing, something that went beyond just missing my friends.

I quickly left the page, and stood to gaze out of my window in thought. (I like it that my window faces West. I feel as if I look homeward.) It was at that moment that my ears, previously listening only perfunctorily to the familiar music heard the chorus, "There's gotta be more to life. . ." Suddenly, I was crying, overwhelmed with the feeling that there must be more to life than books and study, as much as I love both, burdened again with a longing I have long buried and ignored: the desire for my own home, my own family.

At this point I will avoid inserting any disclaimers about being in the right place in my life, etc. The point to this exercise is to acknowledge the ache, and to realize that I need to learn to live with it. That is a part of my dream for the future, and the lack of it is part and parcel of the "already and not yet." So that is where I am. I pray I will learn the lesson that God is seeking to teach. I pray I will learn to be okay with how intensely I miss those people I have never met: my husband and my children.