Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Week 32 - "Home is wherever I'm with you..."

There’s a picture on my desk in my bedroom here.  Actually, there are several pictures, but right now, I want to focus on just one. It’s one of my favorite pictures of all time and was taken a little over a year-and-a-half ago on the night before one of my best friends, Anne, left to move to London. Anne was going to London and with the end of summer, most of us were returning to university or graduate school. So, a whole bunch of my favorite people gathered at this little Irish pub in the town my mom lives in.  There’s a whole slew of awesome photos from that night of all of us together, but this photo is of just a few of us.  My friends Anne, Jess, and I tried to get together for a group shot, but then a bunch of our other friends jumped in and the result is well… this:





All of us laughing together in a candid you could stage if you tried.  I can’t really remember most of what we were laughing at, and I know that whatever exactly it was that we said that night in the midst of our goodbyes is not what really mattered. What mattered is how we felt together – that feeling that still keeps all of us coming back together after all these years of making each other feel this way that can all be traced back to high school lunch tables. To me, that feeling is home – that feeling makes those people my home, wherever we find ourselves. It’s the people that make the place.

The reason I have that picture on my desk to look at every day is because it makes my heart smile as I remember those many laughs we shared that night and every night that we were all together. So, why am I telling you this story in my mission blog when I’m here in Cape Town now?

Like I just said (and recently heard in a good movie with bad dialogue), it’s the people that make the make the place. it's the thirteen housemates who make me laugh pretty much every day - usually multiple times.  When I’m bored in the evening, I just stumble downstairs to the kitchen, join in the banter as we all cook our dinners, and wait for the punchline, gesture, or other wordless noise. It’s the Ladies’ Nights at the Radisson, courtesy of the women at Hope Africa.

Home snuck up on me here, when I wasn’t looking. I must have been too busy laughing.