Redefining Home, Part 2: Home Is Where Your People Are
Several months ago, I wrote about being homesick for the Midwest, about how the transient life I’m leading has gotten under my skin now that I’m down South. Then, I read something my friend Seth wrote about the meaning of home, citing the lengthy list of places he and his wife Amber have lived since they got married. He said, “We’ve treated home like a pair of jeans.” This resonated deeply with me, because I’ve had about twenty “homes” in as many years. But what he wrote at the end of his post resonated with me even more:
“We’ve made home nine times, and each feels as settled as the last, at least for a while. Each place feels like home. Why? Home, I think, is where you are; it’s where we are together. And antsy as I may grow from time to time, as itchy as my feet might become, I’m home so long as we’re together.”
Finally—finally—I’m starting to feel like this, I think. Home is where my people are. I still miss Michigan and long for deeper seasonal changes (just this past weekend I took the extra blanket off our bed because spring has sprung in Memphis, and I thought, Didn’t I just put this on?). But home is becoming more and more about the smiling faces at my table, the foreheads I kiss goodnight, the sleepy baby sighs and laughter and little hands that hold tightly to mine. It’s more about the man I share these little people with, the one who makes his own version of the Egg McMuffin on weekend mornings and tinkers in the garage.
It occurs to me that this is biblical. God designed us to be together. When Adam and Eve lost their garden paradise home, they clung to each other, birthed a family. Abraham, a nomad for most of his life, did everything he could to keep his people together (see Genesis 19). Noah packed up his family and watched as his home disappeared beneath the flood waters—his family was the only home he had left.
Ruth’s famous speech to Naomi has become one of the most popular Scriptures quoted at weddings, reflecting how we desire to find our true home in the love of another: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.” The Israelites as a community wandered in the desert for forty years, their only home each other. Moses left his princehood for the Hebrew slaves—his people, his home. Even Jesus made his earthly home about his spiritual family—he ate, traveled, and lived out his days in the company of his disciples.
It doesn’t matter where I am, so long as I’m with E and my girls. I don’t need a pretty house on a street in a certain town to feel I’m home. I have smiles and hugs and loving words that tell me I’m home. Because home isn’t about a place after all. Home is about the love in our hearts.
