Home...Home...Home.

A hermit crab's life must be hell. Or at least one requiring a great deal of adaptability. As life marches on, the crab outgrows its shell. It must find a replacement. One big enough to call home.

I don't know the habits of the hermit crab. These anchorites of the beach have a way of life that is mysterious to me. I suppose I could go to a Wikipedia page, or dust off an old Encyclopedia Britannica, but truly, I'm okay with not knowing everything, or even a little, about hermit crabs. But I do know that they change shells. They heave off the old shell, perhaps with some effort, like an old ring trapped on a swollen finger. I wonder, do they wait until they've found a suitable replacement? Some shiny big shell that calls out, "Home...home...home..." Or do they wriggle out of the shell, and simply crawl into the sand with the crab's equivalent of a hope and a prayer?

I just moved into a house. My first ever purchased home. The boxes were moved. Most of them are even unpacked. The ones that aren't have found a comfortable resting place in an upstairs closet. There are quite a few boxes in that closet... But my point is, moving I did is a kind of First World challenge. I found the house. Packed my belongings. Shucked my shell and slipped quickly into a new one.

If I were to go to the Mojave desert, park my car, and just start walking towards the sunset... with no sense of where I might lay my head that night, or what shelter might protect me, that would be quite like the hermit crab. As stressful as moving as been... it hasn't been dangerous. Not truly.

And of course there are times in life when we are exactly like the crab. We step forward, out of the familiar past and into the future. We slip out of old ideas and entertain new ones. Perhaps we have an idea of who we are... or who someone else is... and what our lives mean together. Or perhaps we step away from an old idea about God. The Holy beckons in some inexplicable way. Calls us into the heat-shimmering desert. We wonder if we will ever see water again. Sure, the well we've been drinking from has grown bitter. But it's wet. It's familiar. Couldn't we just hang back in the shade and drink from the old well? No. Because if we do, we will surely die. And with that knowledge, we follow the lure to find a new Home. With some hybrid of trepidation and hope, we chance the unknown.

And it may be, despite all signs to the contrary... despite our parched throats and sun blistered skin... there is water out there yet, and a place we can call Home.