Every now and then I come across this photo - it’s one of my favourite shots (of me) ever - probably because it was actually on stage, rather than staged.
I guess ‘on stage’ is my favourite place to be. I sure do feel at home there. I feel like I’m filling out the shape I was created to be, just a little more fully.
Stranger in town
People often ask me where I live - it seems a commonly innocuous and accidentally banal thing to say to a human unit who’s passing through a place, though it bugs me more than I ought to let it. (Australian blues singer/songwriter/guitarist Fiona Boyes has a magnificent song about always being the stranger, or new folks, in town.)
Sometimes I’m wearily dismissive and answer “well I live in [insert name of town here] tonight!”. Other times when it’s accurate I say “in my van”, or occasionally the longer spiel about a tiny place between Toowoomba and Dalby...
Once, someone asked me the slightly sideways, but not brand new question: “where’s home for you?”, and that time I straightaway said with a gentle, inner-calm-radiating smile (at least that’s how I imagine I appeared, in my memory): “on stage”.
A birthday wish
It’s certainly my favourite thing to be doing on my birthday - to be on stage far away, singing my little lullabies and fight songs, chattering on about what it feels like to be me or someone I used to be, and what that’s taught me. Where my comforts lie, I suppose.
What most fulfils me - I believe because it’s the purpose God planned for me.
A true home
Which leads me to where my real home is - and it’s nothing to do with this world. Neither a building, a town, another person, nor that warm friend of mine, the stage, are my true home. If I were to focus on nesting in those things, and not in God and the place He prepares for us, I’ll surely get in a tangled web.
Back to this photo, taken by Steve McNeil during my show at the Wesley Anne in Melbourne, late 2018. Whatever it is I’m singing about here - I must be meaning it.
Truth and an outlet for it, sounds like a beautifully sustaining ecosystem to me. Like a home ought to be.
I’m reminded of the lyrics of a gospel song that stung me with conviction when I first heard them:
“This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through.”