She’s looking outside her window wondering where home is.
She looks lost and sad and alone. She doesn’t feel like anyone understands her. She just wishes she knew someone who did. But the people she thought were those people were not those people at all. Helpers who didn’t help. Lovers who only wanted to consume her, not love her. Emptiness that lured her into the darkness, promising the light would come. But it never did. It just led her deeper into despair.
Now here she is. Looking again. And wondering — if she finds it, can she trust it?
I know her because I have been her.
And I know what she was told about home.
The people in the church told her the answer was up there, out there, everywhere but in her. Sin had severed her connection with God. Her flesh was the problem. Her body was working against her. The answer was somewhere else — in a mansion in the sky, in the sweet by and by. She imagined it so much it helped her get through the hard times. Visualizing what life would be like out there, somewhere, someday.
It echoed the cries she made as a child, searching for home.
So she sat in the pew. She followed the order. She thought and believed and forced herself to feel it was true even though it didn’t feel like it was. Because this was as close as she thought she’d ever get.
What she didn’t know — what nobody told her — was that she had been learning, very slowly and very thoroughly, to leave her own body. To mistrust the one place she actually lived. To look for home everywhere except the only place it could ever actually be found.
Hillary McBride writes in The Wisdom of the Body that when we try to avoid the challenging things we experience in our bodies, we sacrifice the good, the beautiful, the rich.
I read that and felt it land somewhere below my throat.
Because I had spent years trying to think my way into healing. Looking for the right words, the right insight, the right understanding that would finally unlock something. If I could just find the correct framework, the perfect concept, the theological reframe that made everything make sense — then I would arrive. Then I would be home.
But you cannot think your way into your own body. And you cannot think your way home.
The body is not an idea. It is an experience. And home is not a destination. It is a moment you notice. And then another. And then another.
I know the moment I first understood this.
I was following someone I had come to care about deeply through trees, moving toward cliffs at the edge of the ocean. The land was older than my pain. The trees didn’t need anything from me. The person walking ahead of me had brought me to the place he went when he was troubled — not to teach me something, not to fix me, just to share what was sacred to him.
And something in me exhaled.
I didn’t understand it then. I couldn’t have named it. But I know it now.
Home was me actually being there in that moment.
Not the cliffs. Not the trees. Not even the people walking ahead of me. Me. Present. In my body. Receiving what was actually being offered. For maybe the first time in my life, I wasn’t trying to get somewhere else. I wasn’t evaluating my experience against a theological standard. I wasn’t checking whether what I felt was appropriate or safe or sanctioned.
I was just there.
And that was home.
Most of us are looking for a destination. A fixed state of healed, whole, finally at home that we’ll arrive at someday. When the trauma is resolved. When the relationship is repaired. When we’ve done enough work, read enough books, had enough breakthroughs.
And that destination — that constant looking toward somewhere else — keeps us from noticing what is already here.
For those of us who learned early that our bodies were dangerous, sinful, untrustworthy — for those of us who were taught to live in our heads, to believe our way into new ways of being, to look for God everywhere except inside our own skin — noticing moments of home can feel almost impossible. The body became a place we learned to leave. And leaving became so practiced, so automatic, that we stopped noticing we were doing it.
But the moments are there.
A smile about someone you care about, even across an ocean. The ache of missing someone, which is only possible because the connection is real. An argument that makes you feel seen because someone cares what you think. A book passage that lands somewhere below your throat. The way your shoulders drop when someone says your name like it matters.
These are not consolation prizes for the home you haven’t reached yet. These are home. Already happening. Already here.
You don’t have to resolve your religious trauma first. You don’t have to heal your attachment wounds completely. You don’t have to find the perfect place or the perfect person or the perfect moment that finally feels safe enough.
You just have to notice.
Notice when something in you exhales. Notice when you smile without deciding to. Notice when you feel the ache of missing someone and let that ache tell you what it knows — that the connection is real, that you are capable of love, that your body has not forgotten how to feel.
Notice when you are actually there.
Because home is not the mansion in the sky. It is not somewhere you get to permanently. It is not waiting for you at the end of enough suffering or enough striving or enough belief.
It is the moment you are present in your own life. Fully there. Receiving what is actually being offered.
It is already happening.
You are already closer than you think.
If this found you at your window, wondering — I see you. You are not alone in the looking. And you are not as far from home as you feel.
This post was written in collaboration with an AI writing assistant. The words, experiences, and insights are entirely my own — the AI helped me shape them into something I could share. Written for A Liminal Space by Lori
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