When you’re younger, home is a place, a building on a street in a community, a safe place to be at the end of every day. Where family, memories, and familiarity surround you. As you grow older, that starts to change. When you leave home and start your big adventure, what home means to you doesn’t stay the same. Though your first home will always be special to you; that town, that house, will always have meaning. It will always be the original home.

But, there comes a time when home, doesn’t feel like home anymore. “Home” is defined as a place where one lives permanently. I disagree, I believe that, as you get older, home transforms from a physical place into a feeling. Home is a place where you feel completely content and comfortable; home is a safe place, somewhere you just feel like you fit, where you feel you belong. Home is where your heart is. Home can be many different places.

For me, I have two homes where my family is. One in Iowa and one in North Carolina. To me, these places are homes I can go to soak up family love, places to rest, to love and to laugh. More so, these are places I visit every once in a while, places I can only stay for a while before I feel it is time to move on. Home has been a church in Omaha, where I spent the summer with a great group of girls who quickly and easily became more like sisters to me. I miss this home a lot sometimes. Home has been college, where I lived the last four years of my life. A place I easily called home, where roommates became family, learning and growing, but always knowing it wouldn’t be home forever. For a week, I found a home in Haiti. Loving the people and the children there and learning what it means to live with love and joy with nothing but love and joy. A part of me will always be in Haiti, what I would give to go back there again.

It was after this experience I learned that you will never be completely at home again because a part of your heart will always be elsewhere. “That’s the price you pay for the richness of loving people in this place.” You see, home isn’t where you are at, but where you heart is, where you put your heart and where you leave it. As you get older and begin to experience life, you end up leaving pieces of your heart in the places that you’ve been or with the people that you meet. These places and people mean a lot to you and they always will.

I consider a lot of places to be home. But there is one place I have found that is more home to me than any other, except this home that I’ve found is not a place at all. Home is where you live permanently. If my definition of home is, where your heart is, then this home is where my heart resides permanently, for the rest of my life.

Often times, when longing to be home, it’s not the walls of the house we miss, it’s the people within those walls. It’s the connection, the relationship, that presence of those people or that person that give you that “at home feeling” that we are missing. The security, warmth, and comfort of a home are built into the heart of that person. Your heart is at home when you are with them. And missing them is the worst kind of homesick.

Finding my home within a person is the best worst feeling I’ve ever had. It’s the joy of having that connection with someone, knowing that they feel like home to you, and the emptiness of missing them when they are away. It’s harder than missing a place. You’re missing a person, their presence, their voice, the way they make you feel when they are in the same room, and that level of comfort just having them around.

But, the best part is feeling that way when you’re with them and knowing that you’ll get to see them soon. I get to be home again soon. Look for the ones that feel like home to you, when you think of home, it’s not a place that comes to mind, but a person. It’s a pretty special thing when home transforms from four walls and a roof to two eyes and a heartbeat.

“Home is not where you are from, it is where you belong. Some of us travel the whole world to find it. Others, find it in a person.” - Beau Taplin