What is home? Billy Joel has crooned that “home can be the Pennsylvania Turnpike,” but oh my, how I loathe that road! Once I saw a sign that said, “Home is where your story begins.” I kind of like that. But in the restlessness of life this side of heaven, the ups and downs of all our days—what is home?
This question has been on my mind of late for various reasons, most recently and tragically, with the wildfires that destroyed so many homes in southern California. I thankfully did not know anyone personally who lost their home or their life, but most of my California friends do. I thought about what that reality would be: to have only a few moments to grab what I deemed most essential, evacuating, and returning to everything gone.
My own family has experienced two fires, one that burnt down my grandparents’ cabin in the woods of Canada, and one that caused damage to my dad and stepmom’s house in Delaware, both caused by lightning strikes (maybe stay clear of me during thunderstorms). No one was injured in either situation, but stuff was lost, stuff with sentimental significance and perhaps a few things of financial value. But ultimately, just stuff.
My mom died when I was a child, and my dad, 16 years ago. For so many years at Christmas, there was never a question of where I would spend the holiday because the answer was—“wherever Dad is.” When he died, the first Christmas without him was hard. Because I realized (with gratitude) that while I had many options of loving family members to be with—a reality I do not take for granted—the one person who was my go-to was gone. I realized firsthand that home for me was never really about a place, it was about a person.
2 Corinthians 5 says, “For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens…He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee” (vs. 1 and 5). Ultimately, what God reminds us of, and has given us in Christ, is that he is our home. In community, we get glimpses of home through each other, through Christ in us. When I moved from New York City ten years ago to live in Media, Pennsylvania (with an impossible-to-ignore nudge from the Holy Spirit), I left a place that had become like home to be closer to people who felt like home. And so it goes. God gives us tastes of heaven, where we will all be the fullest, freest versions of ourselves, safe in the arms of the only person who has ever perfectly loved us—Jesus.
Frederick Buechner once reflected, “Sometimes, by the grace of God, I have it in me to be Christ to other people. I believe that it is when that power is alive in me and through me that I come closest to being truly home…The home we long for and belong to finally is where Christ is. Home is Christ’s kingdom.”
And there we have it. Until we are finally home with Christ in heaven, we get each other in community and the Spirit as a guarantee. In an article about the fire-decimated parts of California, the New York Times wrote: “The next Palisades won’t be the same. Neither will a future Altadena…But for now those communities live on in the people comforting one another, helping one another, remembering and recovering.” Comfort, help, remember, recover. Places can be home, and people are more often closer to it and give us temporary safe havens, but Christ is our truest home of all. I can’t wait for that day.
