Where is home?

Two weeks ago, if someone asked me this question, I'd have an answer immediately. My address would roll off my tongue. I would describe the brick dutch colonial built in the early 1920's. The creaking of the antique wood floorboards was home. The ghost on the main floor, who resided in the hallway, mostly, was home. Finding a stinkbug in the attic was home. Home would have been the people in that house and the ones who lived next door. Sitting on the back deck under the stars with cold cans of diet root beer would have been home. Laughing late into the night with the people I loved, all on that plot of land, was home.

Now, I'm not as sure. A week ago I drove six hours from that house on the hill and moved into a dorm room in a town with no hills. No dutch colonials line the streets I walk, and the people I know aren't here either. My childhood home feels like a daydream. I want desperately to reach out and touch it, but every time I try, I'm met with the cinderblock walls of my new room. They're cold and unwelcoming, unlike the sky blue of mine in that house on the hill. If home really was a physical location, then I'm not sure I'd want to stay here. But, through worship and scripture, God is showing me that this is where He wants me in this season. If home really was a place, I wouldn't be here still.

Then what the heck is home?

I could argue that home is the people you love. My heart aches for that more than it does a location. It longs for popsicles on hot days with my best friends, for nighttime drives with my sisters and for early mornings with my parents. These people mean the world to me, but they are not my home. If they were, I couldn't live apart from them.

The fact that I am able to be here now, six hours away from the places and people I hold dearly, tells me that home is not something physical. You cannot reach your hand out and touch it. You cannot unlock a door to enter or hug a friend to greet it. Home is found in the pages of Scripture, in the midst of a muddy, desperate prayer, in the presence of the Savior of the world. Home cannot be touched, but felt. If we live this life searching for a place or a person to call our home, we'll only turn up empty. The only place we will ever truly find home is with the One who created it. Until we let go the notion that home is merely physical, we won't be able to experience the vast beauty and emotion of finding our home in the Father.

No matter where we go, no matter who we meet or loose, our home will be with us, because He is with us.