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I've been thinking about what home means a lot lately. My brother and sister-in-law just moved from one home to another, I recently went on a trip where I stayed in a place that I considered my home, and other things have brought it forward in my thoughts.
For my trip, I visited some very good friends of mine. It was a good trip and a good visit. While I was there, I called their house home and I thought of it as home. It was my very comfortable home for a few days. I tend to think of it as my second home.
Yet on the trip back, as I got closer to familiar territory, I got more and more excited. I was headed home. And I wondered.
I had enjoyed where I stayed and with whom I was staying enough to comfortably call it home, yet I was happy to be going back to my home, because my home was simply that. My home. Why is that?
One of my initial thoughts was I was glad to be getting back to all my things. Sure I had brought what I needed with me, but I had all my stuff at my home. And I wondered, was it really my stuff that made it my home? I didn't think so.
It's nice to have a closet with enough clothes rather than living out of a suitcase. It's nice to have a bigger, softer toothbrush that works better than the dinky, hard one for my travel kit. And there are other things that I couldn't bring with me that are nice to have around. My things. But they're still things.
Is it the routine? While I was on my visit, I was on a vacation of sorts. I didn't really have tasks or a to do list to satisfy. I didn't have much of a time table for the days. I basically had no plans for a day until sometime in that day. Did that make it seem less like home? I've had times like that here...just not during the school year. But then, I still would have been on my mini vacation if I had stayed here, so perhaps that isn't really the difference.
Is it the people? I love the people I live with. I love my friends and family here. But I love the people I stayed with on my vacation, too. Of course the relationships are different, but not in bad ways. As far as people go, the biggest difference between the two homes is probably that I know more people, friends I can call up and perhaps get together with on short notice, close to my home than I do at my second home.
Is it the location? Honestly, there's not a whole lot of difference between the two places to me. Yeah the layout of the town is different, and the location of the houses are different, and the style of houses are different, but both are still cities/towns with shops, stores, streets, cars, people, and parking lots. They both have residential areas of varying quality and fanciness. But really, Wal-Mart seems pretty much the same wherever you go.
So, what is home? What was the answer for you?
Your things? The routine? The people? The location?
A place to crash at night? A comfortable place where you can snuggle in a secure blanket away from the dangers and troubles of the world? An idea of ownership? A place of service you open to others?
A refuge? Your castle?
My question is, If home is where the heart is, why is the heart there instead of elsewhere? What makes home so identifiable that you cling to it rather than to something else in a different town, city, state, country, continent?
I like to think that I'm transplantable, that I can live in some other place--either similar or foreign to where I am now--and call it and claim it as my home. But am I really? I've never truly been tested in this manner; I've only ever gone on short trips away from home, both short in distance and duration of time.
I think my idea of my home is being shaped, formed, and crafted into something perhaps it never was before. Something that I probably never would have thought it could become. God is at work, transforming where my heart is, so that my home may be what He wants.
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