Home Sweet Home - 4

Returning home.... Going back to the place where you grew up is often a journey filled with emotion. As adults, most of us long at some point to return to that time when we were the ones being taken care of instead of being the ones doing the care.

I know that for me, sometimes I long to return to the days where I could sleep in and wake up to the sounds and smells of breakfast being cooked by someone else. To me, that feeling/memory represents the nurturing aspect of my childhood home.

Unfortunately, while we can return home physically, we can't really ever 'go home' to the place we knew as children. Time and space just doesn't stay the same. Places and people change and grow and nothing is quite what it used to be. Our parents, siblings, and friends (as well as children) all age at the same constant rate that we do. Returning home can sometimes make us a little melancholy. We want to be back in that place where we had limited worries and responsibilities but the simple fact of being an adult makes that impossible.

What we can do to fulfill that need to 'return home' is make sure that home (wherever it is - the place our parents/siblings/or spouse and children live) is a place where we feel known and still loved. God has given us opportunities to choose to love people who will love us back even when they really know us. We just have to choose wisely where we choose to love.

God, himself, can be our truest home, in the sense that home is where we feel truly loved and accepted. (side note - home is not a place where we are allowed to do whatever we want and not care about the consequences. Real love also comes with real boundaries.

Making a "home" is really a series of choices that we make for ourselves. Abraham Lincoln said that "People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." This from a man whose mother died when he was nine, whose wife suffered from mental illness, and who had three of his four children die in childhood (not to mention the stress and pressure of the American Civil War.) We may not be able to "return" home or have a perfect home, but we can choose how happy we will be in our current and future home. We have the power and ability to make changes in ourselves that will make us and those in our home happier. We have the power and ability to make our homes a better and more pleasant place to be - we just have to choose to do so.

Our homes really can be sweet, but it takes effort and practice to make them places of comfort and rest.


CS


"My people will live in peaceful dwelling places, in secure homes, in undisturbed places of rest." Isaiah - 32:18