Welcome home

I’ve been staying with some old college friends this past week. I’m in a season of relative homelessness, with most of my stuff in storage and the rest of it crammed strategically in my car. The car actually feels like a lot of room compared to where I lived this summer: for about nine days, I lived in a closet under the stairs in the apartment of some friends of mine (shout out to K111!). I’m going to give some props to my Japanese heritage here and say that I’ve been genetically predisposed to use small spaces well. Anyone who has ever been to Japan knows what I’m talking about. They use every single centimeter (…because only Americans use inches).

But that’s not my point. The house I’m staying in now has five kiddos under the age of seven, so it’s not the most serene of living situations. One of the best parts though, one that more than compensates for the 7 am thunderstorm of little feet on hard wood floors, is the greetings. When you walk into a room and hear a chorus (and there are more than enough kids here to qualify as a chorus) of little voices cheering your name, how can you not feel special? Because you know little kids don’t pretend to like you – they are too young to be tainted by all the games we play as we get older, the popularity contest that life becomes some time around middle school. If kids are happy to see you, they are just happy to see you. It’s a simple pleasure that makes its way through the tangled mess of insecurities and fears and doubts, and hits me square in the center of my heart. Little kids are also too young to be impressed or intimidated by our reputations, those larger-than-life billboards we wear to attract people to us or to keep them at arm’s length. Or both at the same time, if we’re really good at it.

What would life be like if we loved like that? If as adults, we could look past the all stuff on the outside and push past all the stuff on the inside and just love people without reservation? What would it look like to know with certainty that the Creator of the Universe loves us like that? That when we walk into the room (issues of omnipresence aside), God Himself lights up and cheers loudly when He sees us? I think we’d feel more at home in the world, as welcomed and well-received as I feel in the midst of these crazy kids.