“The best journey takes you home.”*
Home. The word itself seems to call out to us. It’s good to be home. Home is the place where you belong. Home is a place where you are from. Home is where memories are created and life is shared. We hear that “home is where your heart is” or “home is where your story begins”.
What is home to you? Someone once said, “Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave and grow old wanting to get back to.”* Home changes. Children grow and will come and go. Loved one’s pass on.
Home is more than the house we live in. Home is a physical dwelling but it is also a state of mind. You can be yourself at home. Home is a resting place. Home should be a place where you are safe, secure, and at peace. Home should be a solace and a refuge. Home should be a place where we are accepted and celebrated. It doesn’t matter much if it’s organized or messy. The important thing is the people who share it with you, even if you live alone. The important thing is the way you are in your space: at home - settled and at peace.
As a parent, I hope our home will always be a welcome resting place for our children. I hope it will be a place of memories and love, hope and contentment - a place where they will always belong. I hope that our home will always be a place they’re glad to be.
The best parts of home - love, goodness, peace, contentment, security - bring a sense of rootedness. What are we rooted to? I think it is a longing that has been built within us. I think it is a truth - a reality that is larger than us and larger than life itself. We are connected to something both here and now as well as something yet to come.
Jen Pollack Michel talks about God as a homemaker. God created a home for us through creation and it is God who satisfies our longing for home in the best sense of the word. The Bible begins and ends with home from the Garden of Eden in Genesis to the New Jerusalem in Revelation. We can get a foretaste now of all that is yet to come, when someday all our deepest longings for a true home will finally be realized. Home is a gift in this world and the next. So let’s enjoy the home we have. Let’s share it and appreciate it, knowing there is even more to come.
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*author unknown