Longing For Home

What makes a place home? This house is amazing—after a year of extensive remodeling, it has lived up to our hopes and more. I love seeing redwoods through the many windows, the skylights in the cathedral ceilings, the cozy window seat, the concrete countertops and big island, the dark warm wood floors, and I could go on—but it’s not really home-home yet. A friend told me it usually takes eighteen months before a place feels like home.

For most of my life, home was the house I grew up in: the small 80’s ranch with dark wood walls, patterned wallpaper, and worn carpet. I remember intense periods of homesickness during college and medical school: I think what I missed then was a place where I could be myself, be taken care of, know I was unconditionally loved. I missed having someone cook for me, my old memorabilia. After moving back to live nearby for the past six years, I don’t miss that house the same way—I think I see I could never really live there again, and I see that one day, my parents will move on and sell everything and it will be gone.

Our last house, the first one we owned, was never one I fell in love with, but it was home because of the memories we made in it. We had three babies there, and it was the first place I learned how to take care of a house, and what life was like staying at home with the kids.

But now that house is gone too. I suppose there is an unavoidable period of time when one feels displaced with any major move: you’ve left the familiar behind, but the new place is not really home yet. We’ve settled in well here, but something will happen that throws me off: I meet up with a new friend at a coffeehouse but just feel sad missing my old friends, the way they would hug me and the way we could talk. I get lost again going somewhere. I think of something my parents would have loved to see or eat and realize they aren’t here.

I think for me, home is a place where I can be myself, a place where I deeply belong. I like the word “dwell”—it’s not a place where I’ve just made a living, or passed through, but a place where I have abided and lingered in long enough to know the place and people deeply, and to be known myself deeply.

This period, when I’m feeling the loss of a home, makes me read Revelation 21 and 22. One pastor at our church here pointed out that the story doesn’t end with the same garden it started with: it ends with a city, a place where we work and live together. I love that the word picture Jesus gives of heaven reminds me of coming home, to my own room. And when I feel lonely, I love that the story ends with, “He will dwell with them,” and in 22:4 with “they will see his face.” And that will be enough. All of this—my husband, each of my kids, this house with the redwoods—all of it is on loan to me, and as much as I love it, will be gone or changed one day. But I have this promise: this longing to belong is not in vain. One day, I will see his face, and I will live in a place that is home in every way, and that is a kind of comfort now.