Coming Home

How, then, should I tell my story? In what context should I frame all of the events of my life up to this point? Often when we sit down to tell our story, it is assumed that we have a finished product at hand. Dear friend, we are never a finished product. As long as there is breath in our lungs, there is a story yet to be told. How, then, can I sit down and tell my tale? Well, although my story is not yet complete, I can document all the chapters that lead up to now. I suppose the best way to write this tale is to say it is the story of my journey home. 

Home. What is such a thing? When you say the word, what comes to mind? Do you think of a warm fireplace, perhaps loved ones who have known you since birth? Or perhaps you, much like me, don’t know the meaning of the word. If home is defined by a roof over your head and a warm place to sleep, then I have never been without a home. In fact, under this definition, I have had many homes over the years. Between my parents divorce at four years old, the friends and family willing to open their homes to us during our trips, and the bouncing between Ukraine and America as my mom did the work of God, I had many homes indeed! 

But it always seemed as though home was a place where I wasn’t. When I was in Ukraine, it seemed obvious to me that home was in America. But when I was in America, home felt like it was somewhere else, it was an imaginary place with imaginary friends to make up an imaginary life. I would be in America, visiting with family and going on the Christian world tour, all the while thinking to myself “this would be home, if only…” What followed next always changed, but there never ceased to be a predicate to that sentence. Never ceased to be something that had to happen before I could truly call it home. Perhaps, under all definitions, home was simply a thing that I didn’t have. Perhaps I simply hadn’t found it yet. Who could tell? I certainly could not!

Despite this sense of instability, life carried on. Eventually it came time for us to find a place to go to school. We got our education from a little school set up specifically for missionaries. They called themselves “Kiev Christian Academy,” or KCA for short. From the fifth grade all the way through graduation I studied in those halls, and rattled the cages we called walls. Those youthful years are especially chaotic under normal circumstances, but adding a foreign country and subtracting a father transforms the recipe from a brilliant masterpiece into a complete mess. And to make matters even worse, our school became notorious even to the rest of the continent as the strictest in all the land. Although this does not compare to some of the catholic schools I have heard stories about here, it was enough to rattle even the sturdiest of us. Not a soul was left unperturbed by the pressure. 

So drama found its way in, and what fueled me was an illusionary hope: the belief that one day it would be over, and I would finally be able to go home. There was that word again: home. To the reckless lad that I was, home was the loving embrace of relatives and the hope that friendships would bloom like flowers in the spring. It was hope that one day the chaos would be over, and life would find itself a sense of “normal.”  It was hope that the roaring noise of the orchestra would fade, leaving only the gentlest of instruments in its wake. A few gentle flutes playing in such a peaceful harmony that even the most rageful of spirits could be put to sleep. 

For that’s exactly what I was: a rageful spirit. All the chaos, the sparks and the noise. All the changes, rearranges, darkness and noise. Noise, noise, noise and more noise! My whole life was plagued by this noise. I dreamt of the day when all would be still. So this hope I held close until the day finally came: graduation. My days as a youth were at an end. I sang my song, danced my dance, said my farewell to cold lonely nights, nightmares and troubles. It was time to go home. 

And off I went, to the place I called home. But the chaos, I found, clung to me still. When all around me was calm, I held a dangerous will. You can take the man out of hell, but you must also take the hell out of the man. All the scars that had gathered in my time overseas, they clung to me. And it wouldn’t be long before those scars would start to bleed, infecting everything I touched. The first year was one big celebration, a victory lap of sorts. A party so sweet it would have made the greatest of kings jealous. Before I knew it, summer had arrived. I enjoyed my college, so when word spread that jobs were opening up on campus, I leapt at the opportunity to join a crew (plus I could work without having to drive, a convenient thing for someone without a car.) 

That summer was the peak of my bliss. I had fun, made friends, and even found a lady. But that summer would become the setup for the biggest fall of my life. It would seem that part of achieving your dream is keeping it, and I was far from ready to keep what I had found. The start of another year also brought with it complications. Between the partying and the rifts it caused, and something deeper growing inside of me, everything started to fall apart. By the time I graduated, I knew none of the people from that summer. None of them on my roster of those I called “friend,” and none rose up to take their places. 

That was in the state of Pennsylvania. Through a series of doors being opened and no shortage of help, I set my sights on Colorado. By the fall of 2019, I had successfully made the move, and by that December, I had secured an apartment that I would spend the next four years in. But did it feel like home? That’s a hard question to answer, as I was so busy securing a job and a future that I had little time to visit the present. I bounced from job to job, every six months starting a new vocational adventure. I poured my sweat, tears, and occasionally blood, into my career, bouncing from friend group to friend group almost as quickly. 

Eventually I hit a wall, and life called out to me. “It’s time to quit running and face the mirror” it told me. The demons that had wrecked so many of my homes were finally ready. They were lining me up for their final assault. Fear, panic and rage consumed me and everyone around me became a target. Friendships were broken, bridges were burnt, and I had nowhere to fall. 

Or so I thought

Pressure boiled up between myself and a friend I had recently made. It bubbled and bubbled until the pressure finally broke. In the heat of the argument, one thought and one thought alone became clear as day: this friendship was over. I sat with one eye on the fight, another on the door. One of my previous searches for a friend group had me looking for churches, and an old job drove me past a church on the side of the road. For some strange reason, it was the one church I never got around to visiting as I desperately ran the church marathon. To google maps I leapt, “driving” the route on my phone to find the spot. But as I found what I knew to be the place, I noticed something: it was no longer the same group who owned the building. It mattered little to me, it was still a church left unvisited. It was an instant connection. Immediately I knew I had found something sacred. Home? Who knows, in the heat of the moment, there were greater concerns in the forefront of my mind. 

Thus, I made the transition from my last friend group into my church. It has had its hiccups, bumps and complications, I may truly be able to say that this is home. But this is where the past meets the present. Maybe you could say I had many homes, maybe you could say none of them were truly meant to be. Maybe I’ll call this home forever, maybe it’ll be gone next year. But one thing I do know: to have a home worth having, you have to become a person who can keep it. To reach a certain type of place, you have to become a certain type of person. I must look inward to change the outward. This is my story of finding a home worth keeping.