Why Did I Run Away From Home?

As a kid, did you ever think about running away from home?  How many of you reading this actually tried running away from home?  I informed my mom on several occasions that I was running away.  Sometimes she offered to pack my bags, while at other times she threaten to beat me all the way home when she found me,

I never ran far from home.  Usually I ran across the field thinking if momma beat me all the way home it would not be too much of a beating.

My favorite place of refuge was an old oak tree adjacent to where I built my home.  I would leave home crying promising never to return.  Under that tree, I would think of all the injustice of home.  Mom never understood me.  I never ran away from home while daddy was home.  He worked as a mechanic on evening shift at the rock plant.  I think the only time I threatened to leave when daddy was at home that he told me if I left, never to come back.  Mom was more sensitive.  I knew she did not want me to leave.  Dad was a different story.

Under that oak tree, I would look to heaven and gaze at the stars.  I imagined all sorts of things.  Wiping tears from my eyes and snot from my nose, I would host a big pity party.  The only attendees were crickets, tree frogs, and mosquitoes.  After thinking of all the things I could do with my life to make momma sorry she caused me to run away, I would sneak back home.  I would peak in the window to see how much momma and my brothers and sister were mourning about my leaving.  Most of the time it looked as though were having a “glad your gone party.”

Moping for a while, I would go inside.  Momma was so glad to see her prodigal son that she fed the fatted calf and tried to kill the prodigal son.  I guess that it why Jesus’ parable on the Prodigal Son is from the perspective of the father and not the mother.

Several years down the road of life, I wondered why I wanted to run away from home.  I once told daddy that I wished I were a million miles away from home.  When I did leave home, my whole perspective about home changed.  All mom and dad were doing was showing love to their eldest son and preparing him for a long journey called life.

C. Welton Gaddy in his book Geography of the Soul says, “Our perspective of the world comes from our perspective of our home.”  Home was the place I learned to read the Bible and learned how to pray.  Home was the place I learned about life and about death.  Home is the place I learned how to share and how to cooperate.  Home is the place where I learned about pride, integrity, honesty, and commitment.  My spiritual nurture came from home.  Gaddy also says, “Spiritual nurture does not depend on physical structure.”

I understand that.  Our home was a shack structurally, but spiritually it was a magnificent mansion.

In many of my articles, I speak of going back home.  Home is not the same.  If a home does not change, it spells disaster.  Home as I knew it does not exist.  Each time I work around the old home place, I understand the saying that you can never go back home.  I have come to realize that when I go back home that I am not looking for what once was, but I have learned that if home is a place of nurture, where I learned affirmation and criticism, where my thoughts challenged and my spirit lifted, and where my thoughts and love for God developed, I can go back home.  As Gaddy states, “We need to go back home . . . If we cannot return home, we will do well to carry our home with us.”

I realized that the week after the Fourth of July several years ago.  After visiting my aunt and uncle who live across from my Chilton County home, I told my aunt that I needed to head back home.  She asked if I were spending the night.  I told her, “No, I going home to my present assignment.”

She had the most baffling look.  While up home, I refer to our Chilton home as Sugar Ridge and where my assignment home as home.  With that look of concern she said, “You’re not coming back are you?”  I said, “That depends on the Lord.”

When Jesus returned home to Nazareth, instead of recapturing feelings of glad satisfaction, instead of finding a spot He loved to go, a breath of familiar air, or a place to prop His spirits, He discovered heartache.  People who pampered Him and encouraged Him now wanted to kill Him.

For Jesus to return home, it was not to reminisce, but it was to remember His purpose.

And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up for to read.  And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:16-19 KJV).

In January 2018 I did return to Chilton County and my family is deteriorated and home on the story burned in 2012.  I catch myself cooling underneath that old oak tree and wondering "why?"