Home Was Never Behind the Door

We stand before doors and call them destinies.

This one, we say, and we are saved. That one, and we are lost. And so we tremble in the choosing, as though a whole life waited folded up behind a single handle, and every other door led only to exile from it. We call this deciding. We call it discernment. We call it, sometimes, prayer. But beneath the words, it is fear — the fear that home is a room we have not yet found, and that we might, through some error of judgment, wander past it forever.

I have stood at enough doors now to know this fear personally. I have left. I have crossed water to do it. I have sat in a resort in a country not my own and asked, the way anyone asks, is this the door. And it was only on the far side of that asking — not in an answer, but in the exhaustion of asking — that something else arrived.

Home was never behind a door.

~ Timothy