Where is Home?

Is home a country? A village? A homestead? A county or city? Is home a particular house or the hotel you are staying at while on vacation? Can one have a home in more than one place?

Is home filled with particular people? Do we live at home or somewhere else? How often do we refer to "back home," perhaps as a place where we grew up.

We have homerooms, home games and home teams. Of course there are home-runs and home courts, and we have home-made stuff too for which we often get home-sick.

When teaching English as a second language, I always spent extra time explaining the concept of "house" vs. "home." Though most students wanted to translate them both as "house," I tried to explain that home has a deeper connotation, one that often touches the human consciousness very deeply.

Part of the tragedy of displaced peoples is that they have lost their house, but more importantly, they also lose their sense of home, a place of safety and security, a place where they feel or know they belong. And that is usually how I would explain the English meaning of home to ESL students, the place where you feel you belong. For home truly is a sense, not necessarily a place. You might be able to re-build a house, but re-building a home, a place where you feel you belong, or a place you feel a sense of security and safety and love takes a lot longer time.

Home is hard for nomads to describe too. I've been thinking about the concept of being a nomad again. It is hard to develop a sense of home like everyone else when you move around a lot or when you don't feel you fit into a new context. And I've heard children in families who have moved around sometimes ask, "where is home?"

And so I've developed another definition of "home." Home is where God sends us and abides with us. For God is with us everywhere. He is our constant friend during the lonely times. He provides security when we are afraid. He gives us a sense of belonging even when we don't feel we fit into things around us. I tell our children that we are "home" when we are together and living where God wants us. It doesn't matter what house we stay in or what country, for home is something we carry in our hearts.