Where's home?

We live in such a mobile society these days that the question "where's home?" no longer necessarily means "where is your house located?" I'll be 57 later this year and I have (as best I can remember) lived in 15 different houses/ apartments in 6 different states. Where's home? Facebook provides a place to indicate the current city in which you live as well as a declaration of your hometown so, I guess, those aren't necessarily the same thing (not that what Facebook thinks carries that much weight mind you...) Growing up in a military family, some of the places we lived were rental or military housing so, I never really got overly attached to houses. Still don't. Carol's maternal grandparents owned farm land in north Georgia and that house was always thought of as the "home place." It held great emotional value to her family for many years. Today that house looks pretty broken down and we don't even know who owns it now.

What makes a place home? There is a saying "home is where the heart is." I've never really understood exactly what that means, though. When we travel, we normally refer to the return trip as "heading home." So, the logical answer is that home is where you currently live. Right now, home for my daughter and son-in-law is a foreign country 7,000 miles away. Certainly they can't feel like they are at home can they? I mean, home must be our house or our son-in-law's parent's house...right?

They have a very nice, very new and modern apartment with some nice furnishings. After a long day of teaching (her) and flying helicopters (him) I am sure they both look forward to heading to their home. But they admit that they get homesick from time to time. So, where's home?

I think all of us have a longing for "home." But a street address can't be all there is to it. There is something more powerful than that to describe "home."

Carol and I are having an interesting conversation (debate) about what to do when we retire. I have floated the idea of selling the house, buying a motor home and hitting the road. We would certainly need to test this lifestyle out for a few months before making any long term decisions but, that's my idea. Carol's not diggin' my idea though...she isn't willing to not have a house of our own that doesn't have wheels under it. The idea that the location of "home" may be written in pencil is just not something she is prepared to do. (I figure I have about 5-6 more years to work on this plan to win her over...  I estimate my odds are 70/30 AGAINST)

As I have gotten older my longing for "home" has not diminished. It, in fact, has become more acute. But I now realize that my longing for home has everything to do with "who" and a lot less to do with "where." For me the who is Carol. Where she is is home to me. But there is another "who" that I long to be with. As beautiful a home as God has created for us here on earth, this is not "home" to me. There is a groaning I experience. Mark Buchanan, in his book "Things Unseen" attempts to describe it. He says that "groaning is holy speech." He says that "groaning is homesickness."

He recalls Emerson's words "[w]hen God wants to carry a point with his children, He plants His argument into the instincts."

Buchanan further writes:

"You want to go home. The instinct for heaven is just that: "homesickness, ancient as night, urgent as daybreak. All your longings--for the place you grew up, for the taste of raspberry tarts that your mother once pulled hot from the oven, for that bend in the river where your father took you fishing as a child, where the water was dark and swirling and the caddis flies hovered in the deep shade-- all these longings are a homesickness, a wanting in full what all these things only hint at, only prick you with. These are the things seen that conjure up in our emotions the Things Unseen. 'He has set eternity in the hearts of men' the writer of Ecclesiastes said; 'yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end' (3:11). Groaning is the lexicon and grammar of our dis-location, our sense of being in the wrong place. It is our mother tongue, the speech we fall back on when we can't recall the words to speak in earthly language, that foreign tongue we're trying to learn to speak fluently but keep garbling."

So, where's home? We were designed by our Creator to be in relationship. Where we go to experience and nurture those relationships...that's home. In the meantime, I groan.

Things Unseen by Mark Buchanan- Multnomah Publishers Copyright 2002 by Mark Buchanan