Home

Years of boarding school fostered a deep love for home. Countless nights my mind wandered familiar places as longing filled my soul and soaked my pillow. This desire for home has never left. It has been tempered over years of study, motherhood, and ministry. I have travelled to many places, lived in several houses, and created my own space that I now call home. Yet the home of my childhood still holds a special place in my heart.

Etched within my memories are winter storms, wide-open fields, and vast blue skies. Yearning still fills my heart as I recall familiar places that are no longer mine. Years have silenced the voices I once cherished, and the passing of time has robbed the house of its beauty and charm. The place I long for lives only as a memory of days I once knew. 

Home is more than a house or being with the people who raised us. It’s the yearning to belong, the reaching of our hearts to be welcomed and celebrated, and the desire to find rest in the love and acceptance of others. Home is where we head after a long day at work, or the sight of well-worn faces that have shared our past and shaped our memories. It’s a space that is ours and a sanctuary we long for. It carries the scent of the familiar and the pull of the known. It is the comfort of the predictable, and value for the things we cherish and share. It’s moments with loved ones in the celebratory and the mundane.

For believers, home is more than a location. Home is abiding in the One who has become our dwelling. In Him we live and abide. He is not just in us, but we are in Him. This reality is our security and the basis of every blessing we enjoy. The acceptance we long for, the safety we crave, and the validation we seek, are all found in Him. There is no home like this home, for everything our heart yearns for, is fully met in Him.

Furthermore, the Lord promised that if we love Him, He and Father will come and make their home with us (John 14:23). We are God’s home. He longs to be with us and enjoy the closeness of love and the comfort of home. Regardless of where we have come from, we are His home, and He is happy to be with us. While we may see brokenness and mess, He sees a life that is redeemed and precious. The One who brings perfection with Him, is content to dwell within us and calls us His home.

Home is also a place we long for, though yet unseen. This home is not connected to our memories but to our dreams. It is our forever home; the place where we will be fully celebrated and completely alive. Jesus promised that He was going to prepare a place for us (John 14:2). The One who created worlds with His words, is preparing a dwelling place. What love and attention to detail fuels this preparation? What expectation fills His heart as He anticipates bringing us into the place that He has fashioned and prepared? With childlike wonder we will enter in to all that He has done and delight in what He has lovingly created. First Corinthians states that eye has not seen, nor our mind been able to conceive what God has prepared (1 Corinthians 2:9). We can’t even begin to imagine what it will look like for the Creator to be the architect of our forever home. It will be beyond the splendor of anything seen or known. But greater still, it will be home. We will know the exquisite joy of being with Him. We will imbibe the atmosphere of peace and the glory of redemption. We will experience the fullness of His acceptance and delight. Sorrow will go, striving will cease, for we will be home.