Amber Haines (@AmberCHaines) is haunted by God. Like Eve in the Garden, she craved the fruit that she thought would lead her to freedom. But the whispers of temptation led her instead down a devastating path toward isolation, dissatisfaction, and life-altering choices. In her most broken moment, Amber met God waiting for her in the fallout, freely offering her grace and life.

In her new book Wild in the Hollow: On Chasing Desire & Finding the Broken Way Home (Revell, 2015), Amber tells a story of the God who makes himself known in broken places. Amber calls readers to dispense with the pretty bows we use to dress up our stories and instead trust God to take our untidy, unfinished lives and make them free, authentic, and whole.

The following article is an excerpt from Wild in the Hollow: On Chasing Desire & Finding the Broken Way Home.

The Homesickness

If you were to meet me in person, the first thing you’d notice is the green from my Mama’s eyes and the prominent nose from Daddy’s sprawling Scotch-Irish and Native American line. If we were to speak, I wouldn’t be ashamed of my honeysuckle drawl, the sense of home that drips from my mouth.

If you were to see me as a child, you’d see me with my sister, our manes a tangled mess, wind-wild in saw-briar woods. We never knew then to relish our age. We only woke in our time like babies in a blanket unfolding. I had grandmothers in three directions, baby brothers, and good cousins. We had a canoe in the yard and the lake down the road. We caught crawdads and sang “Blue Moon of Kentucky” while daddy played guitar. The sky turned navy, and the whippoorwill called us in. We were Alabama girls in the dirt, Alabama girls lying down on the front steps. We knew the safety of a gentle Mama. Dark came, and the woods crawled, always a snap from something hiding. Eyes glowed everywhere. We knew the settled way, the silence within, and we knew how to listen in the dark.

The sky looked like a sea of bats, and under their darts, we would close our eyes and let the cicadas and an Audubon’s variety of frogs lift us into the hum and heartbeat of wild song. And then we would listen deeper. “What do you hear?” we would ask. An owl, the rustled leaves, truck door down the road, coyotes by the dozen: invisible things were everywhere, but we knew how to hear.

There had been a death in our house decades before us. A great-aunt had an aneurism. There was an attic, and I always wondered if she watched me from its window above. I knew that snakes lay in the dust. The crow’s shadow always weaved through the limbs. We were never terribly afraid but stayed close enough to hear and to eat from the garden.

Once I dangled from our Appalachian Mountain in a tire swing, my hands choking the rope, body spinning fast round. The pines climbed to heaven and shivered, letting go the needles. I was in the safe invisible arms, my father’s world. Then the terrible scream of a wildcat echoed into the hollow from right near by, and I fell and hit the ground as the wind picked up in a furious howl, chasing me into the house, then blowing down the hill through a field of bitter weed. The wind took up the small places, the black knots in dead wood and the frilly powdered undersides of mushrooms. The maypops and pecan hulls, every one encased by the wind, their scents rode on it and pushed at Mama Lois’s rippling pond while cattails danced. There’s something out there. I knew it then, and I know it now, something bigger and other. The terrible and the beautiful is watching me.

The invisible has always been as real to me as the smell from behind the barn, the hogs and then the sweet mix from the pile of chestnuts that Peggy Israel’s mama gave us. I always knew there was more than what my eyes could see. Maybe that’s why it’s easy for me to imagine Eden. I have my own version, the place where I clearly remember my early childhood experience as beautiful, wild, and protected.

I wonder if I know a little of what Adam and Eve may have felt, or at least I like to imagine it. Adam had home with God, who was still on his breath. He couldn’t have known how marvelous it was to simply unfold and speak in holy-tongue. God taught original language there but let Adam choose what to call the animals. When he woke to Eve, I wonder if he thought her like a dove. She wasn’t made from the ground like the rest but was made of his bone, strong. He loved her. He loved how he fit with her. They were whole there together at home, where a million metaphors began, all the ways to experience God.

They were naked by the river, listening, legs sprawled out how kids sit wide open in front of their mamas, no shame. The sky was a sapphire and full of water. They were in the freshness of God’s rest: easy sleep and fulfilling work.

When the angel came with the flaming sword in every direction, sending them away from the Tree of Life, what grief must have pressed in. This is where our inherited sense of homesickness began. The clothes they hadn’t needed before were sewn by hand of God, and then the babies came, and with them born violence, rejection, and enough shame to send the world into needing a flood. Belly to the sick ground, the snake’s slithering tongue became clearer and clearer.

How they must have looked back and remembered. How they must have missed home. When Adam’s plants bore no fruit, did he close his eyes and taste Eden’s pomegranate?

I wonder if he was like I am, when the seasons change, anything shifts at all, it reminds me of home. I long for it. I can taste it. I’ve been known to wake up early in the morning, imagine the biscuits, and start packing my four sons here in Arkansas to drive all the way to Alabama. I get sick with missing, but every time I go, it doesn’t seem to have the same sweet feeling as the one I had as a child. Not many even know my name there now, and the sense of freedom I used to have isn’t any easier there than it is here. It often doesn’t stop me from trying though. I long for a place to fit, and sometimes I forget and become desperate for a sense of peace. I want to hear my daddy say my name. I want to listen to the creek run white over rocks with my sister. I want my children to feel the wind sweep through.

All the striving to regain such feelings of home, even as I create home now as a wife and mother, I know none of it will do to give me peace. Home here really is a mere metaphor, but it’s one that anchors me, how wild and free we were when we were too small to care for ourselves in that hollow at mountain base. The way I remember home is the same way the prodigal son remembered his when he found himself eating scraps. It’s the place we know we can go, where we’ll be received and fed. It’s where we know we have a name.

I’m not so naïve to think that most people have lovely childhood memories of home like I do. I think we were the only people on the planet to have a ginormous swimming-pool slide in our yard without the actual pool at the bottom. Even still, I wonder if you feel it, too—the homesickness for a people and a place to belong, the desire for the freedom and safety you might find there, the thrill and the comfort. Maybe it’s what draws you toward the things you hold dear. We often hold on to memories, places, people, and things because there’s something of home in them. There’s a sense of freedom, the belonging that happens with real friends that makes you feel at home. So many of us are working out a homesickness, and I believe the homesickness is what all our wanderings are all about. We’re searching for home—a place of acceptance, a place of fulfillment, and a place of identity. At the basest level, we suspect that home is the place where we’ll find our fit, where we’ll finally be free.

The above excerpt is from Wild in the Hollow: On Chasing Desire & Finding the Broken Way Home. Copyright © 2015 by Amber C. Haines. Used by permission of Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group. www.bakerpublishinggroup.com. All rights reserved. Taken from pp. 11-13.

Bio: Amber C. Haines is a soulful writer and a blogger at TheRunaMuck.com. She is curator, with her husband, Seth, of Mother Letters and is a contributor with many acclaimed writers and bloggers at DaySpring’s (in)courage. She has been involved as a coordinator with both BlissDom and !dea Camp Orphan Care and continues to build meaningful relationships with church leaders, lifestyle bloggers, authors, advocates, and poets. She lives in Arkansas.