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June 13, 2011 in Chris Daughtry,going home with 10 Comments

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As a parent, sometimes I feel like much of my time is spent correcting my kids. I know it exasperates them. It’s not much fun for me either. But I’m trying to raise them to be responsible and respectable. Not because I want them to be successful. I mean, of course I want them to be successful, but more importantly, I want them to be responsible and respectable because those qualities are important to me. I often feel I’m fighting an uphill battle in a society that seems to teach that everything is always someone else’s fault and you are entitled to just about anything for no other reason than the fact that you want it. So I correct them, I take away privileges and I wonder if any of it ever sinks in. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a drill sergeant or anything. I just feel like one at times.

But recently, after one of my kids experienced a difficult and bitter disappointment, I was reminded that one of the most important jobs as a parent is to be here for my kids; to make sure they know that no matter how big and bad this old world is, there is a place where there is acceptance and love. This place called home.

“Home is the one place in all this world where hearts are sure of each other. It is the place of confidence. It is the place where we tear off that mask of guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us to wear in self-defense, and where we pour out the unreserved communications of full and confiding hearts. It is the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out without any sensation of awkwardness and without any dread of ridicule.” ~Frederick W. Robertson

I’m staring out into the night, trying to hide the pain
I’m going to the place where love
And feeling good don’t ever cost a thing
And the pain you feel’s a different kind of pain

Well, I’m going home, back to the place where I belong
And where your love has always been enough for me
I’m not running from, no, I think you got me all wrong
I don’t regret this life I chose for me
But these places and these faces are getting old
So I’m going home, well I’m going home

The miles are getting longer, it seems, the closer I get to you
I’ve not always been the best man or friend for you
But your love remains true and I don’t know why
You always seem to give me another try

So I’m going home, back to the place where I belong
And where your love has always been enough for me
I’m not running from, no, I think you got me all wrong
I don’t regret this life I chose for me
But these places and these faces are getting old

Be careful what you wish for ’cause you just might get it all
You just might get it all and then some you don’t want
Be careful what you wish for ’cause you just might get it all
You just might get it all, yeah

Oh, well I’m going home, back to the place where I belong
And where your love has always been enough for me
I’m not running from, no, I think you got me all wrong
I don’t regret this life I chose for me
But these places and these faces are getting old
I said these places and these faces are getting old
So I’m going home, I’m going home

This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival: Home, hosted by my friend Peter Pollock. To read more on this topic, please visit him at PeterPollock.com

Songs about Home

April 2, 2009 in C. S. Lewis,going home with 13 Comments

Have you ever noticed how many songs there are about home?:

Homeward Bound (Simon & Garfunkel)
I wish I was, Homeward bound,
Home where my thought’s escaping,
Home where my music’s playing,
Home where my love lies waiting
Silently for me.

Take Me Home, Country Roads
I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me
The radio reminds me of my home far away
And driving down the road I get a feeling
That I should have been home yesterday, yesterday

Can’t Find my Way Home (Steve Windwood)
You are the reason I’ve been waiting so long
Somebody holds the key
Well, I’m near the end and I just aint got the time
And I’m wasted and I cant find my way home

Green, Green Grass of Home (Tom Jones)
It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.
Yes, they’ll all come to meet me,
arms reaching, smiling sweetly.
It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.

Home (Chris Daughtry)
I’m going home,
Back to the place where I belong,
And where your love has always been enough for me.
I’m not running from.
No, I think you got me all wrong.
I don’t regret this life I chose for me.
But these places and these faces are getting old.
So I’m going home.I’m going home

I know there’s many, many more songs about home. But, really — what is this mysteriously place we call home? I don’t really buy that old expression “Home is where the heart is” unless the Holy Spirit has taken up residence within that heart. And even then, there is a longing for this seemingly unattainable peace, this distant memory just beyond my reach where I am safe from harm.

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I am originally from Virginia. My family also lived in Charlotte, NC. Of the three places I have called my home, I spent the least amount of time there. So, why do I long for that home? What is it about that place? I think I’ve finally figured it out. It has nothing to do with the place. It has to do with the circumstances. This is where I lived with my intact, traditional family shortly before everything went to sh*t. A house where I felt safe and protected — and even that was an illusion that would soon come crashing down. I used to sneak into my big sister’s room and listen to this song on her record player, which is my very favorite “Home” song:

“Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever gonna make it home again. It’s so far and out of sight. I won’t be happy until I see you alone again. Till I’m home again and feeling right. I want to be home again and feeling right.”

I want my children to grow up in a place where they feel protected, cherished and loved –knowing full well that a home here on earth is an illusion. God created us with a longing for our eternal home. Whether or not a person buys into that explanation doesn’t change the reality that within each of us that longing resides. In “The Weight of Glory”, C. S. Lewis writes:

In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.

Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.
These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now.

Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever.

This is not our home. As my Aunt Phyliss might say, “Sugar, our home is Way Over Yonder

For the record, I’m the younger sister, not the one holding the cat. That cat hated me. This might have something to do with the fact that I dressed him in Baby Tender Love dresses and forced him into my toy baby stroller. I suppose I’ll never know for sure…