Home

This week I'm in Philadelphia visiting relatives and it has just reaffirmed something that I've been thinking a lot about lately. That is home. What exactly defines home or makes us feel at home? And what about homesickness?

I've lived in the same state, same town, same road, same house, same bedroom my entire life. To any normal person, home would be my house and my family, and for the most part, that has been true in my life. Then I started college and everything began to change.

Until my senior year of college, each semester I lived in a different dorm with different roommates. Then I lived in a house with four girls. This past year I lived in a different house with five different girls. This year I'm living, yet again, in another new house with two new girls. I have not had consistency or stability in my living conditions in 5 years (soon to be a 6th).

I began realizing that home is not in my house or living conditions, it's not even with the people I am living with. So where is home? What is home?

Society likes to tell us that we need elaborate, well-decorated buildings to call home. We need nice home furnishings and a spouse and a couple kids, and the ability to entertain guests. This is all part of the need to fit in and to be comfortable, which feeds materialism or at least a focus only on this world, taking focus off of eternity, our true goal.

Not to be morbid, but someday each of us will die. What happens then? What has everything we have collected into our comfortable lives here come to? This world is passing. While it's nice and good to have material possessions, and good quality ones at that, if we put all our eggs in our basket here, we'll miss out on the forever. We have to invest in our future, which happens to be heaven and eternity with God.

Home is really wherever God is. Home is heaven. And we need to be working towards that everyday. Put your eggs in the basket of eternity, not in the biodegradable basket of here and now.

So this homesickness I've been feeling pretty intensely for the past few years is really my desire to be with God kicking into high gear. Of course I will never feel completely home on this earth, I wasn't made to be here forever! I was made for heaven.