Growing Up and Leaving Home

Growing up is all about leaving home. And if my life-experience means anything, "leaving home" is a recurring event, sometimes by choice, and sometimes by circumstance beyond our control. However it happens, growth in thought and emotion requires that we leave our home, and what we do upon leaving home is to seek another one, and in between the one and the other, a lot of traveling, uncertainty, dead-ends and side trips, until we arrive somewhere that offers settlement, security, a place to call home.

But "this world is not my home, I'm just a passing through" says it well. And sooner or later, the new "home" becomes staid and boring, unproductive and damaging to the human spirit, the God-created human spirit that longs for adventure, for new learning, for fresh hope and new friends. So, we pack our bags again and take off. Some look at us and wonder why. What's wrong with home, because it's their home, too, and they've settled down in it, they've sunk deep roots, and others around them sink their own roots, too, and with tendrils and vines, ensnare one another, making it virtually impossible to leave, or at least to leave without great effort, to uproot ourselves, and likely uproot others, too, in the process, tearing away the tendrils of "love" that hold us in place, vines that encircle and clutch and cling and tell us, "stay put."

But the human spirit, energized by the creator of our spirit, yearns and leans, and pulls and tugs ... to seek freedom on the road, to find a new home, a home that will last for awhile, until the urge to leave again emerges.

To "stay home" eventually kills the spirit, and nothing more deadly than a dead spirit, because dead spirits still "live" like zombies, sucking the life juices out of the still-living. Sucking the life out of others, until they too die, and become part of the living dead, or something like that.

To "stay home" beyond the early years when home provides nurture, comfort and formation, is deadly. To "leave home" is essential to the soul's health, and ultimately to the home in which we were reared, because when someone leaves home, the home is changed, too, maybe even transformed into something ever-more dynamic and growing.

The road ahead always beckons, and the spirit yearns to get going.