Home
Home … wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of ‘home’ wasn’t ‘away’, it was ‘lonely’. When someone said ‘I want to go home’, what they really meant was that they didn’t want to feel lonely anymore.
Kate Morton, Homecoming
Home is a concept difficult to pin down and define or dissect. Yet it is also an experience common to all humans: the feeling of being home.
It’s the chair that has moulded to your shape so it fits you perfectly; the smell that you can’t actually smell anymore because it is so well-known; the knowing of where everything is in a kitchen (logically ordered or not).
Having spent over a decade living in a different continent, speaking a different language and experiencing a different culture, home is something I have thought about a lot: feeling far from home, building a new home, welcoming people into our home.
This was further compounded by the transition of moving back to the UK, a place I still thought of as ‘home’ to an extent, only to find that it wasn’t anymore. Both the UK and I had changed, moved on. We hadn’t thought to tell each other either so it was quite a shock. Maybe more to me.
So where is home? Where do I fit perfectly into that moulded chair? Where am I complete and not lonely?
The Bible deals with this restlessness we feel, this search for a true home. The language used in the Old Testament is less around home and more around land. God promises the people of Israel a land of their own: a home. Many of the books of the Old Testament centre on the people getting this land, travelling to it, taking possession of it, being exiled from it, returning to it… You get the picture.
Then in the New Testament, in the book of Hebrews, you get this amazing statement about Abraham:
By faith he (Abraham) made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
The real home is this city designed and built by God Himself. We often call it Heaven.
A sense of restlessness is to be expected if this world as it is is not home at all. A homesickness even. But I think we do get glimpses and experiences of this home Abraham was looking forward to.
And the great thing is that as Jesus said, in this home there are many, many, many rooms prepared for us (John 14:2). Getting to that home will feel amazing.
