Home is Where Your Heart Is

The old wicker chair gently creaks behind and below my tired legs as it reluctantly grows damp in the cool evening air. The long-bladed grass shines an odd shade of blue in the filtered moonlight and slides sharp between my toes. The deafening symphony of crickets serenade the air around me as I silently attend their nightly worship with the stars peering intently through their shroud of humid Indiana air. My eyes gently survey the gathered masses of cookie-cutter, cottage houses that ebb along the bottom of the hill, amused at how they seem to huddle together for warmth and quietly drift asleep to the booming chorus of summer bugs and the soft shimmer of a midwestern eve. The image is reminiscent of something I've seen lavished on the illustrated pages of a children's book, and yet this is my haven; my refuge; the place from whence I was thrown. This is my home.

It is now that I realize the magic that lingers in the places we call home; a mysterious ownership within the heart that sustains our sense of peace and the promise of safety. When you're home, perspectives somehow seem to broaden and our fickle place in the world becomes just an ounce easier to understand. God seems to descend from His ethereal Throne to reside within a mere whisper and our burried troubles spring forth from the angst and the dark to make their voices heard. Perhaps it is the serenity of home that reminds us to pause from life's hurried journey, and in the 'resting' we usually rediscover our affinity for spiritual sustenance. Indeed . . . it's in this stillness that we find our souls. Home is a function of our sense-of-self, an irrational affection to places that somehow seem to bind us and hem us in ... to define us. No matter how broken our physical homesteads come to be, upon returning we always carry with us the hidden hope of familial wholeness, tranquility, and love. And no matter how wonderful going home can be, it never fully dissolves the profound longing in our hearts for perfection. And so, I find it to prove true that home IS where your heart resides. And my heart is desperately clinging to the hope of Heaven, from whence this world fell.