Home: A place where you belong; a place where you can be who you really are; a place where you just fit.
The idea of home has inspired beautiful songs, epic stories and even tragic and passionately fought wars. There is something in the heart of men that desires a place to belong, that they can call their own.
As a stay-at-home mom and wife, home is something I care passionately about. My entire role and contribution revolves around creating an environment where my children and husband feel secure, feel welcome and feel loved. I want our home to be a place of wonderful memories, opportunities to learn and where mistakes can be safely made. I want my family to know that no matter where they go or what they do in life, they have a home where they are always welcome. I want them to look back on their time under my roof with great fondness and seek to build something similar for their own family one day. Call me sentimental (yes, perhaps a little) but I’ve learnt that who we are is tied to where we come from and because of this the place we call home plays a part in defining who we are as people.
There’s no place like home
Despite my wish to create a place of belonging for my family I’ve found that there is an elusive quality, a “hard to pin down” aspect to the idea of home. As an adult, having moved away from the place you grew up, it’s difficult to completely recapture that sense of what home was. There are things that will remind you of home – smells, sounds, images; but nothing quite measures up to the image we have in our minds. In some ways there’s no place like home – even home!
Still haven’t found what I’m looking for
For generations writer and thinkers have been inspired by the idea of a place where we belong. They’ve tried to capture the feeling of never really finding what we’re looking for or the fact that the sense of truly being “at home” is continually just out of reach, a longing for something that just won’t be satisfied.
The author C.S Lewis wrote:
If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world. – Mere Christianity
He surmised that we are unable to ever truly feel at home and content because the place that we find ourselves is not the place we were created to be. The Bible talks about the fact that God has placed eternity or heaven in our hearts and it is that – our real and intended home – that we are longing for. Nothing else can fully silence the niggling not-quite-right or homesick feeling that remains even in our happiest, most content moments. Even though nothing on earth can fulfil this emotional need, there is hope in knowing that as a believer in Jesus, one day when this life is over we will be able to return to the place where we were intend to be and it’s through a relationship with God that we will be able to finally be home.