Confession: I misplaced the feeling of home.
This past week I got to spend a few days in my home state: good ol’ sunny Florida. As much as I love traveling the world and seeing new places, I never pass up a chance to spend a few moments in the Sunshine State. Now before you go judging me for loving the land of old people and tourists, I think we need to discuss and define home.
Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines home in several ways, but a few include “the place where a person lives”, “a familiar or usual setting”, and “a place of origin”. These seem like pretty typical definitions of home, right? When I hear the word “home” though, something resonates much deeper in my soul than simply “my place of origin” or “the place I live”. So I did some brief (and I mean real brief, like 2 minute search on this website brief) research on how home is defined in the Bible. I’m not gonna lie, I mostly found Greek and Hebrew words throughout the Bible that do simply mean “house” or “a place where someone is from”, just like the M-W dictionary. But I did find one Greek word (endemeo) used in the New Testament that translates as “among his own people”. That hit me a little deeper. Among my own people. I like the way that sounds.
Now like I said, Florida is my home state. You could also argue, though, that Tennessee is my home state since I’ve spent almost 10 years here. Here’s where we get to those misplaced feelings. I’ve spent years living in tension between two places. I mean, the first few years living in a new place, it’s ok to call the old place home still, right? The place you spent your childhood, where all of your dear ones still reside…? But after you’ve survived middle and high school in the “new” place, you start to wonder if home has changed. I can never seem to balance the tension in this piece of my story. Some seasons I decide to bury the pain of leaving the place where I felt loved and known by completely disowning it and awarding Music City the sacred title of “home”. Other seasons, when Nashville seems to be more of an annoyance than anything else, I attempt to disown it and claim that I’m living in a land that is not my home. Then I’ve had those awkward brief seasons where I’ve spent even just a few weeks in another city and suddenly I wonder if maybe I should pick up my confused definitions of home and give them a completely new name.
Here’s the thing, though: I seem to be believing lies about home that I’ve been too stubborn to let go of. My whole life I tied home to a single, geographical location. Yes, I recognize that the geography feels like home because of the people there, but I still tied it to a singular, physical location. I awarded those places the title of home because it’s where I felt I “had more joy” or felt more like “I belonged”. Proverbs 14:13 tells us that “even in laughter the heart may be in pain, And the end of joy may be greif.” The problem is I compartmentalized most things in life, so in every season of life, I try to separate joy and sorrow, which causes the “home tension” to be even more…tense. So it becomes easy to disown one home and claim the other, then flip flop when the seasons change, rather than embrace the tension like Proverbs suggests.
You’re probably starting to wonder where all this is going…to be honest…I started to get lost. This is what I’m learning, though: home doesn’t have to be singular. Now I’m not going to give you some “home is where the heart is” cheese platter. I’m also not going to trek down the path of this earth not being our real home (although as believers, we all know that’s truly the case). If we think of home, though, as “among one’s own people”, then I think that as believers, home starts to become a lot of places. As followers of Christ, we’re called to live in deep, intentional, life-giving, honest community, right? And as part of that, I think we also have a unique bond with one another, because of Jesus, where, if we let ourselves, we can connect with one another on deep levels without having known each other long. So if you have that deep connection on top of years of shared experience with one another, I think it’s safe to say that you can call those people “your people”. But then when seasons change and the Lord moves your geographical location, after a while it’s likely you’ll have that in lots of places, whether places you’ve lived, extended seasons of travel…whatever the case may be.
What I’m getting at is that home is wherever you have deep, intentional community with God’s people. It’s where you’re known and loved by others and where you know and love others as much as we can as broken believers. For me, that’s now in multiple places. Both in places I’ve lived or simply where the people I love have moved to. Sometimes it’s lots of people in one area or just one or two. So I’m starting to embrace the tension of home and learning to let go of what I believed had to be true. I’m learning to be ok with feeling at home in lots of places.