home.

I think “home” is a strange concept.  People say, “home is where your heart is,” “there’s no place like home,” or my friend says, “home is where life realigns itself.”  After a childhood full of moving and an adult experience that has been nothing but transient, I have grown content with the concept that heaven is the place that is home.  Until then, each place feels a little like home, but parts are missing.  This is largely due to my philosophy on home.  To me, home is people.

I’ve thought this for a long time.  After a year in a van with 6 other people, it becomes apparent rather quickly that consistency, a sense of home, is only found with those consistently with me.  Home was my team.  I’ve seen that happen with college, camp, and internship.  It became the most obvious, though, once I’d left my “homes” and returned for visits.

This past week, I had the pure gift of spending a few days in a place where I’ve never lived, but it has seldom been trumped in the sense of home it brought to me.  I’ve never called St. Louis home before (except for in regards to Busch Stadium..go Cards), but a handful of my closest people live there.  They make it so for me.

It’d never been so clear as it was this past week that we are created for relationship.  More than a location, mom's cooking, or gardening in the summertime, home is a state of the heart.  Think about what you do when you get home after a long day.  You change into sweats, put your hair in a pony tail, lounge on the couch, and let it all hang out.  Home is where you can be comfortable, safe, and let down walls and masks that get put back on the moment you step back out the door.

This is my heart’s reaction when I’m among these people.  I’m comfortable.  I’m unafraid to show the most embarrassing and silly things that are often the most honest things about myself.  I feel safe to put on my emotional sweat pants and wipe off the make up of what is socially acceptable.  They see me with my flaws, joys, fears, doubts, and whimsical dreams.  I am known for all the crazy and lovely that I am without my value being placed in it.  And because of that, I can rest on the couch that is our friendship.  I am recharged, encouraged, delighted, and delighted in.  We laugh at things that would never even be shared outside of this home.  We cry about things the rest of the world wouldn’t understand.  We reach the silliest and most broken parts of who we are and the best parts of who we could become and it’s beautiful and refreshing.  In that place, I am so restored.

I watched in these past days as three of my favorite married couples delighted in each other and found home in those relationships.  For the most part, they are all away from familiarity of family and friends.  There are struggles, changes, and growing pains that they are enduring.  They have learned to lean on each other, have grown in that relationship, and have become home for each other in a very real way.  I can’t even imagine.  I already feel so at home with some of my friends.  Even thinking about being known and loved at a level greater than what I've experienced thus far is thrilling.

My dream of home refuses to stop there though.  How thrilling it will be to finally be in the presence of our Maker!  He knows us completely and loves us fully.  To be present in that kind of relationship and see it face to face is beyond amazing.  It’s wholeness.  It’s what my heart yearns for.  Even more than my greatest comforts or relationships, it’s satisfying.  To walk in and be welcomed by familiar open arms that I didn't even knew I recognized.  I see the best parts of myself in this Being.  I am consumed by His love and His glory.  I am complete and all is as it should be.  And that's when it happens.  I've arrived.  This is home.

I'm reveling in the fact that I got just a glimpse of that this past week.  I want to hear--what's home mean to you?