A few weeks ago, at the Senior Banquet, I offered an address to our graduates entitled: “Leaving Home: A Survivor’s Guide”.  People assumed I was trying to be funny (with moderate success).  But I was being as serious as an Ambrose Bierce Civil War story.  It is true that the best roommates are not clever, popular and rich. The best roommates are quiet, tidy and have their own car (#2).  It is true that $.79 is better spent on a Taco Bell Bean Burrito than on a tin of potted, variety meat spread (#6).  It is true aerosol deodorants, even used in large quantities, are no substitute for bathing (#7).  All ten pieces of advice I shared were the products of hard-earned wisdom, which, if taken seriously and practiced, would save our young people hours of irritation and embarrassment.     

One bit of wisdom I shared produced an immediate reaction among our mothers, whose level of offense surprised me.  It was lesson number three:

       3.  Your mother may really miss you when you go off to college or to the service of our country.  But that doesn’t mean she does not have definite, involved and immediate plans for your room when you’re gone.  She may cry bitter tears when she leaves you behind at the dorm, but she’ll be stopping at the Home Depot on the way home for paint chips.  Even if you are only gone two weeks, you will return home to find that most guarded sanctuary – your room – is now a day spa, an exercise room or a potting shed and that your Rickie Henderson rookie card, your complete set of X-men comic books and your box of transformers have been shipped off to Goodwill Industries to make room for your mom’s cropping table.  Moms are cold that way; don’t let it break your heart.

       I had several moms (would 4 be several?) confront me that very night.  None of them denied the truth of my advice; they were just irritated that I brought it up.  They threw phrases at me like:  “Am I supposed to just tape it off like a crime scene?” and “Do you expect me to turn it into a shrine?”

       Mom’s are like that.  Men are the ones usually incapable of seeing any nuance in a relationship – things are either black or white.  In this case, however, it is the woman of the house who insists on the clean break.  Maybe it is the momma-bird-pushing-you-out-of-the-nest impulse.  Perhaps it’s the opportunity of finally having, as Virginia Wolf said every woman needs, a room of one’s own (I thought the whole house belonged to them).  Maybe this response is evidence of a deep-seated ambivalence towards the nursing-and-nest-feathering role mom’s play.  Perhaps it is a way of coping with loss.  Maybe moms generally are always in need of more household space.  I don’t know and I won’t because I am a man, and as God said to Habakkuk (1.5), I “wouldn’t understand, even if it was explained” to me.

       I do understand that I have a Father and a Brother in heaven who are readying a space that is mine, even though I am away.

       In my Father’s house are many rooms.  If it were not so I would have told you.  I go to prepare a place for you.  And if I go to prepare a place for you I will come again, and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there you may be also.  (John 14.2-3)

       I know that the King James Version and many of my favorite hymns translate the word mona, “dwelling places”, as “mansions” not “rooms”.  Perhaps, but we dwellers of three dimensions can not become overly dogmatic about the transcendent, heavenly realm.  The point is that going to heaven is not like going away.  No one is going to catch you gone a week and move their African violets onto your desk.  Heaven is coming home, and coming home to stay.

       In the place where we belong, forever.