What does "home" mean? (5 minutes)

On Wednesday morning I tell my roommate that I'm going home for the weekend. On Sunday afternoon I tell my parents that I'd better be heading home soon. Somehow these both make sense. What do I mean when I say "home?"

Surely it's not the house, or even the town, I grew up in. When I go to visit my parents it's nearly always at a place they bought just two years ago. Is it the place I've slept most often in the past year? That seems a bit functional and transient for something we have a reckoning of being beyond logistics and having some enduring character.

A good friend told me that home for him has always been where his parents are, or somehow contained in his relationship with them. When he's been in Bolivia, or Nicaragua, or northern Michigan, he can get that feeling of connection to home by talking with his parents on the phone.

This question is dominant in the 2001 movie Joe Dirt. When David Spade's character returns to where he grew up he's reminded by an old Cajun man that "home is where you make it", but the man's accent is so thick that I always heard it as "home is where you naked." (Joe Dirt hears yet another thing)

In many ways home is where I'm naked and feel okay about it (maybe not in the physical sense, I don't think my roommates would appreciate that). Home is where I feel free to be who I am and to express what I believe to be true. It's the place where my guard is down. Where I never fear someone asking "What are you doing here?" because I have some intuitive sense that I belong there.

With this conception of home being where I'm naked in mind, what would it mean to "dwell in the house of the Lord forever"(Psalm 23) so that my home is in him? This would mean I stop playing the foolish game of trying to hide things from God. This would mean I am not burdened by the idea of being worthy of his love. This would mean standing before the one who first loved me to say, "Here I am, in all my failings and ugliness."

Concurrently, what would it mean for Christ to make his home in me as Ben Walther prays? If Christ has a home in my heart, that means He is free to be who He is. No longer would I be clothing the Holy Spirit with my own conceptions of what God should be like, forming him in my own image. If God had a home in my heart he could speak exactly who he is to me, freely and simply.

If my home is in God and his home is in me, perhaps I have some solace for the very real and human disconnection and loneliness we all feel sometimes. Perhaps when I'm seventeen thousand kilometers from everyone I love, or spending thirty years in the jungle rarely speaking my native tongue, or missing my friends in the isolation of a pandemic there's something that still roots me that I can rest in.

How do you define home?

How does this understanding inform your identity and how you cope with loneliness and isolation?

(People besides you could benefit from your thoughts on these questions! Comment or message me with your thoughts.)

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