The Suitcase That Never Fully Unpacks
Updated: Sep 2
“Foxes have holes,
and birds of the air have nests,
but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”Matthew 8:20
There is always one suitcase that never quite empties. A few things remain inside: a spare charger, a folded document, a jumper kept “just in case.”
You tell yourself you will unpack it properly tomorrow. Then another week passes. The suitcase stays half-open in the corner of the room, neither stored away nor fully claimed.
It is not only about clothes or papers. It is about the quiet knowledge that you might need to leave again, or that part of you has never completely arrived.
Jesus had nowhere to lay his head. He walked from place to place with the freedom, and the cost, of not being rooted in one house. Those who followed him learned to live with a certain lightness, and with a certain incompleteness. They belonged to him more than they belonged to a finished room.
Many of us carry a suitcase like this, even when we have lived somewhere for years. A drawer that never settles. A box still sealed. A feeling that the last unpacking has not yet happened. This can look like restlessness. Sometimes it is only honesty. A life can be faithful without being fully arranged.
You do not have to force the suitcase closed. You do not have to empty it all at once.
The Mass understands this kind of belonging. We come in from many houses, and some of us come from no house that feels complete. We are not asked to arrive with everything in order. We are asked to show up. Bread is broken for people who are still between places. Then we are sent out again, not because the Church wants us homeless, but because our deepest home is not a room we finish. It is the Lord who walks with us while the case is still half open.
Some lives are lived between packing and unpacking. Belonging becomes less about permanence and more about the willingness to keep arriving with whatever you have managed to carry.
The suitcase remains. And so do you.