I am thinking about what makes a place home.
At first I thought that the answer to that question would be pretty simple. But it really isn’t. If you look around, there are two very different ways that people answer that question.
Many people go by the motto that home is where your heart is. From this perspective, home is typically the place where you are from. Or more specifically, home is the place that identifies who you are. That is usually the place where you grew up, but it might be a place that you never even lived that is still an important part of your personal identity. Like your great-grandparents original homestead, for example.
I live in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. Very often here in the Sand Hills people who haven’t lived here in decades will have their bodies sent back here to be buried after they die. That is a function of this belief that home is where your heart is. That idea that home is where the heart is lives deeply inside of many of us.
For me, I grew up in the other camp. I grew up believing that home is where you hang your hat. We moved around a lot and my dad’s job was the kind where we weren’t really expected to be around for long in the places we lived. So for us home was simply a matter of temporary location. Wherever we were, that was home. And for many people out there, this is the accepted view. From this perspective, home is nothing more or less than the place where you live.
Not surprisingly, people who say that home is where your heart is and people who say that home is where you hang your hat tend to have very different views on what makes a place home.
But I suggest that we take that debate to a whole new level. I believe that when we say that home is where your heart is, we are grounding our view of home too much in the past. And I believe that when we say home is where you hang your hat, we are grounding our view of home too much in the present.
I think that instead of understanding home as being something from our past or something from our present, we should understand home as being something from our future.
To this end, I suggest a new saying about home. Home is where you’re headed.
The book of Hebrews chapter 11 is a remarkable section of the Bible. It is about this thing we call faith which is, in a nutshell, the only way throughout history that people have been able to relate to God. Faith means that we trust Him, that we believe Him, that we accept Him. Faith is all of those things wrapped up together. And in this one chapter, we get a fast-forwarded tour of faithful people throughout all of Biblical history.
The thing we see about all these people in the midst of all the very different circumstances of their lives is that they find their ultimate hope and identity and their ultimate home not in the past or the present, but in the future.
For example, regarding a super-important guy named Abraham from the Old Testament we read, “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”
Hebrews 11:8-10
A few sentences later we read, “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had the opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”
Hebrews 11:13-16
For the faithful people singled out in this powerful chapter of the Bible, home was not a nostalgic idea from the past, or a ho-hum acceptance of the present. For these people, home is where they were headed.
Because they found their home in their faith God, they lived their lives neither wishing for the past nor lost in the present, but moving steadily, hopefully, and faithfully toward their guaranteed future. And I promise you, the thing that God built for them and is building for us is greater than anything we could ever build for ourselves.
Therefore, regardless if you call home a patch of land where your great-grandparents set fence posts or just some house or apartment where you haven’t even paid your second month's rent yet, my curiosity is grounded neither in where you come from nor where you are.
I’m curious about where you are headed.
Who are you living for, and where is it taking you? Who is building the house where you are going to spend eternity, and who are you trusting to take you there? If we are going to figure out what makes a place home, we must first figure out what and who we have faith in.
My advice? Have faith in Jesus. He has made an eternal home for us and made the only way for us to get there, which is through faith. For me, I have decided not to live as if home is where I hang my hat and I have also decided not to live as if home is where my heart is. For me, home is where I am headed. How about you?