Ryan's Journal

I've been thinking about what 'home' is quite a bit since Sunday. I know I've come home to my church, but I'd like to reach a clearer definition of what it is home means to me. The word immediately evokes a sense of comfort and respite, something that makes you smile and relax when you encounter it. I guess it goes a little deeper than that. Stream of consciousness to follow, perhaps reaching a conclusion, perhaps not.

I think in one sense home is an ideal we all seek to find in our lives. It's the person or persons, place, job, or thing that tells us, "You're done, you need not look any further." Some will call it happiness or joy, or retirement, or wealth, or whatever it is that they're aiming for with their lives. I don't think anyone can find home in stuff though. Stuff degrades and falls apart, gets stolen, burned, flooded, earthquaked. Maybe that definition of home is getting too far out of this world. True, "heaven is my home," it's the one place, in God's presence, where the journey ends. So that's home in the best sense of the word, but we do use the word to describe life here on earth. So home here is familiar, where we can be our selves and let all the parts of our person that make us who we are hang out to dry with no fears, where we can launch the rest of our lives from.

But familiarity doesn't cover it all. Then any place, or any person, or any thing could become home with enough time. And certainly time is a part of it, but it's possible to spend all your energies in one place and still not be able to call it home; conversely, sometimes we know immediately upon happening on a person or a place that we've truly come home. Of course there's an investment to be made in making something home. Responsibilities for upkeep of literal houses are obvious analogies. So what is it in that instant bond that captures the essence of home and is apparently missing in the cases where investments were made and subsequently lost?

It doesn't come by force. It doesn't come by conscious, reasoned logic. It's wrapped up in who we are, in what God's created us to be. It's as if our hearts were molded to only fit in certain containers. Yes, maybe it fits in more than one, and maybe there's only one that it truly fits in, but we can't stuff them into the cone-shaped containers if ours are cubes.

I'll pontificate one step further. Our hearts can be a perfect fit for Christ to call home, too. And if heaven is where I want to be at home, then my heart is the place that Christ wants to be at home. Yours too. It's a thought beyond measure that He would choose my heart above all the rest of His creation to call home.

Come and make my heart Your home. Come and be everything I am and all I know. Search me, through and through, 'til my heart becomes a home for You.

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