Still Homeless...

Two weeks ago, I celebrated my third anniversary working at Liberty University.

In May, I celebrated –if you want to call it that- three years of living indoors, after spending most of the previous six years, homeless. I should be thankful, and I am, but the bloom is starting to wear off the rose.

When you lose your home, something inside you dies. There is a vault full of memories that seems ever-more empty as time rolls on. It has unfilled shelves where moments were supposed to be, but aren’t. You remember the Christmases, and the summer evenings and the clear, cold winter nights when you sat outside and looked at the Milky Way and you know there should have been more. You come home to a house that isn’t yours, and holds no memories for you, and you simply live there. But it’s not home. Not really.

The last few weeks this has hit me hard, and I’ve caught myself shedding tears at odd moments during the day. The sadness of losing the home I’d worked for and had grown to love, coupled with the reality that given my situation now, it’s unlikely I’ll ever own a home again…at times has been too much.

I was thinking about the folks in Houston. So far, almost 200,000 people have lost their homes. That’s an enormous number. That’s the size of a lot of entire cities in the U.S.

I feel so much sadness for them. What if you simply can’t rebuild? Your home is in your heart, but it needs a physical embodiment, and our houses become that. I know mine was. My house represented the struggles I’d had and the victories I’d won up to that point. I worked hard to get that house. I survived a divorce that crushed me, the soul-crushing time-restriction of child visitation. I ached with loneliness when my daughter wasn’t with me, but I soldiered on. That house, was our place. Her's and mine. It was full of peace and calm, and stood in stark contrast to her mother’s house, with its tension and violence. She wrote the foreword to my latest book and she described it as her safe-haven. And it’s gone.

But it’s not gone from our hearts and that hurts. It’s a picture on my wall –invisible to anyone else- that silently compares itself to this cramped townhouse we now live in. It’s a vivid scene in my mind as I drive down the twisting country lane I lived on and see my beautiful little yellow rancher as I round the curve. Only now I must drive on past, because it’s not my address anymore.

More and more it feels like it was my last chance at home ownership. It was so perfect for me…that house of mine. It was just right. Nothing about my current address is just right. Nothing. I sleep here, I cook here, I shower here. Repeat daily. I own one couch. We have a crooked little kitchen table that is so warped and sloping your plate will slide off if you’re not careful. We have one chair for the table. We can’t even eat dinner together, my daughter and I. We hardly care because we both feel the same way about this place. It’s just a rental. It’s not home. All our memories lie in a 2000 square-foot yellow ranch house on five acres in some other part of the world. We just live here. But we don’t live here.

It’s not that I’m not thankful for my job and for not being homeless anymore and especially for having my daughter with me where she’s safe. I am. But it’s been three years now. The reality of what I went through has sunk in entirely and the truth about where I am and where I am likely going, has also shown its face. I am lost. Lost, and feeling like this will be my lot in life for the rest of my days. 

A tenant. 

Physically living here, but emotionally living hundreds of miles away. 

I’m stuck. 

I haven’t succumbed to the idea yet…not entirely. I fear that when I do, I’ll be completely without hope from that point on. Living without hope is the worst form of death. Brennan Manning wrote in “The Ragamuffin Gospel” that there are three ways to commit suicide: Take your own life, let yourself die, or live without hope. The last choice is the most dubious, because it takes so long. You’re already dead and you don’t know it. Or you do, and you feel it constricting you and swallowing you a little more each day. I feel that way. I feel –for the first time in my life- that it’s pointless to dream now. That it’s past the point of planning for something better. That this is all there is, and all there will be, and it’s time to get on with the sad tedium of trudging through each day for the rest of my life.

The only hope I cling to is that my daughter will have a far better life than she would have had otherwise, had we stayed as we were. That, and the hope that maybe God is still working in this, and this isn’t the final chapter for me yet. He owes me nothing. I don’t have any expectations of Him depositing a house on my lap, or some mystery millions in my bank account.

I have to pretend. I have to smile and make-believe that this is okay with me. I have to deny the ache in my soul, that cries out for a real home and some real friendships and some real hope and a job that elicits pride and a sense of accomplishment. There is a line in Thomas Wolfe’s classic “You Can’t Go Home Again” and I think of it often. It fits me now and the mere fact that I am living this quotation breaks my heart all over again. But I must live this, or the pain and loss will overwhelm me. It is this:

“Man was born to live, to suffer and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the end. But we must, dear Fox, deny it, all along the way.”

There are those who’ve had it worse than me. I know this. But comparing pain and heartache is a fool’s errand. I’ve had all my heart can take. Maybe your heart could have taken more. Then too, maybe I would have smiled and laughed at your tragedies. It’s impossible to measure and quantify.

Three years have come and gone since I woke up from that nightmare. But I woke to find that some of that dream is reality, and I’ll have to deal with it for the rest of my days.

In some ways, I am still very much a homeless man. In need of a home. A haven. My own little castle to defend. Until then, the warrior in my soul… he who would defend that castle and it’s residents, remains at large. Wandering. Scanning the horizon for the shadowy outline of the place he calls home. Hoping to see it soon. Fearing that he won’t.