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Good Morning, ‘Thirteen months to the day, since Gandalf sent us on our long journey, we found ourselves looking upon a familiar sight – we were home.” I thought of this line, from the end of Lord of the Rings, as I returned home after many months away. It wasn’t that I’d risked life and limb dropping the one ring into the fires of Mount Doom, but I had lived in a place full of conflict and no little danger. A place that is, for some, a promised land; but for others a home to which they long to return. I was returning to the equivalent of The Shire, a place of comfort and familiarity. ‘You’re back?’ a neighbour asked me in the street outside my house. ‘How was it?’ ‘Unsettling,’ I replied, scrabbling for a one-word summary. ‘Good to be home?’ ‘I think so,’ I said, my ambivalence hanging like a judgement I didn’t intend. It is good to be home. I am grateful to have a house to come back to. And that I live in a place of relative safety and peace; that I have the freedom to leave and return as I wish. And yet, even now, after seeing friends and family, walks in the park, pints by the river, gathering for the Rugby, a lingering sense of displacement remains. Some of this is classic re-entry stuff, the reverse culture-shock any traveller experiences if they’ve been away long enough - to be, literally, un-settled. It’s also something to do with having made friends with people for whom home is a dangerous and constraining place. And then having to see life here through that prism - with different eyes. I thought it might just be that the country has changed: A new Prime Minster, a new monarch. A tracker mortgage that has tripled. We were returning to a nation that is still obsessed by property while simultaneously struggling to house people. A place that seems to be less inclined to offer a home to those who have left theirs. Maybe this is Mordor after all! The poets and prophets are right: A home isn’t necessarily where you live; it’s where your heart is. And if part of your heart is with people in another place, then you can’t completely be at home. An unsettled disorientation is the price to pay for having made a temporary home with others. The Hebrew scriptures tell us that when Abraham made his home in the promised land, he remained a stranger in a foreign country. Along the way, however, his faith assured him that his true belonging was beyond the material. As we wend our way in this world, perhaps a restlessness is connected to this sense that there may be a deeper place beyond, where we are secure, loved and fully at home.