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homesick turkey

a few months ago, i was asked to give my "testimony" in church. i was given 5 minutes.

::

It was beautiful, really. Our first turkey. No past turkey cooking experience to rely on. No one to tell us what was inside the white bag. Not even to help us locate the thingies you’re supposed to pull out before cooking. It made sense that we would cook a turkey on Christmas day, but the turkey itself was a frozen, ten-pound mystery. Appropriately, we started laughing.

Hours later, I was standing on the back porch, thinking to myself: I’m 29, for the first time I’m not at home with my parents and sisters and crazy Uncle Phil, my friends are in the kitchen drinking whiskey, I’m out back smoking—it’s Christmas. Half of me felt homesick, and 2/3 of me felt as if I were home.

I walked back into the kitchen, where Michael, Chris, Bo, Tirzah, and Paul were hovering over mashed potatoes and asparagus casserole and stuffing (northern) and croissants and a cooked turkey, whose previously unfound bag of thingies, fortunately, had not exploded. Appropriately, Bo gathered us together to express our gratitude to God. “Father,” he began, “this food is a gift. Thank you.” He continued praying, and though Bo is not generally given over to ecstasy, for a moment I wondered if he had taken up tongues, but the tone and the cadence were a bit too sharp, digital even. Fortunately, it was only a cell phone. Bo kept praying, and for a moment, it seemed as if we were so in-tune with this Christmas prayer that we might block out the potential awkwardness altogether, this unexpected intrusion into our communion with God. Unable to hold back his excitement, however, Paul, after the third ring, and in response to the phone’s sudden intrusion, announced with delight, “It’s a Christmas miracle!”

We all fell out laughing, I leading the charge, and I realized: This is what I was made for, this is what I was saved toward.

How did I arrive here? In, now, 4 minutes, how do I communicate what God has done for me, and how He has had mercy on me, which is what Jesus, in Mark 5, instructs the now-converted Gerasene demoniac to tell, the only kind of legitimate testimony? In some ways, I can’t tell it, and all I’m left with are pictures, metaphors and similes. The kingdom of heaven is like this; the kingdom can be compared to a man who . . . .

Based on this Christmas, it’s clear that he’s had mercy on me corporately, but this “corporately,” this community, is, in one sense, only my present destination, my final foster home—I, with the faceless masses, had moved from home to home before this. How did I get here, to a kitchen in St. Louis with a turkey and a cell phone and laughter, where everyone knows my name? How? Who can say? "Why," though, is different. Why, because, at one point in my history, God himself called me by name, and I heard laughter.

Sometimes I sit in a coffee shop or on the bus or in the classroom and essay myself—consider, ponder, wonder about me as an individual, as a being. I look at other people and wonder if they think like I do, what it’s like to be in their heads, wonder whether they sit and look at me and think about me the ways I think about them. I simply can’t fathom what it’s like to be someone else, in a different body, with a different heart.

In a few minutes I will sit down, and, likely, I will begin looking around, wondering what you’re thinking, what it’s like to be inside your head. And one of the few things I will know for sure is that, regardless of whether you consider yourself a Christian or not, we have this in common: We have both longed for home, for something that makes sense to us, and we are both homesick, knowing that we can’t fully explain what this home looks like, knowing that we won’t be satisfied with trite, expected answers, easy answers that don’t take into account that complexity that makes us individuals.

In February of 1992, the second semester of my freshman year in college in Starkville, Mississippi, I found myself sharing a 12’x12’ dorm room with a guy named Karl. It was late, the lights were off, and we were lying in our loft beds, waiting for sleep. I was on the verge of blurry-head, that delightful moment between waking and sleeping, when I heard an unexpected voice, an intrusion into my communion with sleep. It was Karl. He said, “Jeremy, I’m sorry.” I thought for a moment, trying to recall something he’d done that required apology. Coming up with nothing, I replied, “Sorry for what?” “Well,” he said, “I hate to know that if my roommate doesn’t wake up in the morning he’ll be in Hell.” For those of you who know me, you realize that one of the few sentences in my evangelistic dictionary that I am hesitant to use is that one: “You’re going to Hell.” And here’s the miracle, that despite the fact that I had grown up a non-Christian, that I despised God-talk, that according to all my previous experience I should have thrown his words back at him and told him to go to Hell, I couldn’t say a word. I stared at the ceiling and counted tile holes, and though Karl, who said nothing else, fell asleep, I couldn’t. He had called me by my name, communicated that, if nothing else, I, as an individual, mattered. And though I didn’t like his pronouncement, I loved the fact that he cared. So much so that the next morning I drove to where he went to church, walked into the pastor’s office, and said, “Hey, listen, Karl (you know him, right?) told me that I’m going to Hell. Is that true?” The pastor looked at me, laughed for a moment, and said, “Get a look at this.” He opened his Bible for me, read Ephesians 2:1-10, and said, “So, what do you think?” “Makes sense to me.” This was my moment of conversion, my adoption papers signed for the last time.

11 years later, 11 years full of joy and tears and depression and doubt and frustration and beauty, it still makes sense to me, but the thing that gives me hope is that it makes increasingly less sense.

I keep going back to these two core longings: the longing for a home, for something that makes sense, and the increasing and persistent feeling of homesickness, the knowledge that there’s something here that I can’t fully explain, something unexpected, something I could never have guessed or dreamed.

When I said that day that it makes sense to me, I was referring to the fact that somehow, Christ’s death puts me right with God. This is true, and, essentially, is the only thing one must believe to call himself a Christian. For the first few years after my conversion, I focused doggedly on the “right with God” part, the makes sense to me part, which meant I neglected the room that housed doubts, questions, mystery. Thus, my new home began to feel like a halfway house, or maybe like the amusement park "fun" house. I had the facts, had a picture of what things were supposed to look like, yet I looked into the mirror and saw distortion, I couldn’t understand why people seemed crazy. I kept them at a distance when they didn’t fit what I thought someone right with God should look like. I saw myself distorted and wondered why, if I had been made right with God, I still felt and looked so ugly so much of the time. I repented and repented and repented, and, somehow, I always looked back at myself, and I was still not what I thought I should look like, and I wondered whether I had been tricked. The whole thing began to make less sense to me.

One day a few years ago, in response to my struggles with this issue, with my confusion over the idea of repentance, someone said to me that only a bad person needs to repent, but only a good person can repent, repentance being complete, sincere surrender to God. This did not make sense to me, and it hit me that I had focused on the “Christ’s death puts us right with God” part so intently that I was skipping over the first part of that: “Somehow,” Christ’s death puts us right with God. Somehow, I can have a home and still be homesick. Somehow, of all the people in the history of the world, only Christ knows me intimately, better than myself even, knows my fears, knows how my jokes work, knows my neuroses and my most shameful secrets and stories. And somehow, because of that and as a result of that, He is the only one qualified to repent for me. Here is the secret I couldn’t have guessed: He, himself, is my repentance, the only one good enough to surrender to God completely, and he did it in my place. Who could have guessed it? I still can’t guess it, but I believe it. I have to. It’s the only thing that both makes sense to me and that I can’t fully explain, that doesn’t offer trite, unexpected answers.

I’m homesick, and there’s a good reason. And yet the more I feel my homesickness, the more I realize how much I don’t understand. The more I see how much I’m not what I’m supposed to be, the more Christ’s particular, individual love for me seems beyond guessing—it’s not what I expected. And as if that weren’t enough, he placed me in a home with people like me, people I get to call brother and sister, people who mirror the somehows of God for me. All of us are still homesick, but we’re homesick together, and there’s always someone around to remind me of, or point me to, or describe for me, or give me a taste of, home.

Standing on the back porch on Christmas day, I thought about Christmas as a child, my family around, people who know how to cook the turkey—when we’re children, generally, community is a given. Now that I’m grown, I realize that community itself is a gift. God has called me by name, given me a new, and final home, and though I still fight with my brothers and sisters, still doubt whether my foster father loves me, still consider running away, when I stop and look around, I realize that this is the only thing that makes sense of my life, and it’s the only thing that I can’t begin to explain, and all I can do is thank God, laugh, and pronounce it miracle. This is what God has done for me, and how He’s had mercy on me.

Posted by ghetto monk at March 6, 2004 05:56 PM | TrackBack