Home

“There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”  Or so Dorothy incants in an effort to get back to this place called home in The Wizard of Oz. As clear as the concept of home might be to Dorothy, I think that it’s much more vague to most of us.  For example, you’re filling out a form or updating your Facebook profile and it wants to know your hometown.  Does it mean the town where you were born? Or does it mean the place you spent the majority of your youth?  Or is home the place you have lived for the past 12 years–the longest you have lived in any one place?  As important as a city, house, or location is, they are not the best understanding of what this elusive word “home” is.

 Was it Robert Frost who said something to the effect that your family are those who, when you go there, have to take you in?  This connotes the relationships which really make home, home.  The relationships were the lure enticing Dorothy homeward.  Or more so, at least, than the physical place.

And, yet, the very thing–relationships–which make home that place of eternal longing can also evoke the most pain and suffering.  What if those precious relationships are no more due to death? What if our gilded childhood memories have long given way to more mature and accurate ones.  And we find out that home isn’t or wasn’t the place we thought it to be.   Or, for those of us who did have a great childhood and home, capturing that for ourselves or our children can become just a quixotic quest.  

I would never have told Dorothy this if I would have been with her, but the sad (yet, also, very liberating) truth is that you really can’t go back home.  Or, at least, the home that most of us would aspire to go to.   But this is a gift from God meant to point us to our real home–our heavenly home–the place where all of our youthful longings and future aspirations will finally and completely and eternally be met.  “In my Father’s house are many rooms,” said Jesus, “and I am going there to prepare a place for you.”  

According to a great writer, Mark Buchanan, this inner longing we have for home is a really a taste of the eternal given to us by God to orient us toward our real home.  It is a foretaste of things unseen.  It is a longing for all the relationships, the locale, the food, the smells, the sights, the sounds, the laughter, and the contentment which home brings.  This longing for home, properly understood, centers us around the most important thing–our relationship with God, the Good Shepherd, in whose house we will dwell forever.

One of best shows that I have seen in a long, long time (perhaps the best show) is the PBS show, Call the Midwife.  It’s hard to explain my love for this show.  And, as the title would suggest, it’s not really a show that guys are supposed to be into.  So, man cards willingly surrendered, I will say that I truly love this show.  This is because it revolves so heavily around the relationships which make an otherwise difficult life of the people it portrays more homelike.   The show is based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth who was a midwife in the 50’s in London’s East End where the poverty was nearly as prolific as the procreation.   At the end of a particularly poignant recent episode the voiceover closes with these words.  I love this description of home.  Whether the author intended it or not, I believe that it aptly describes our heavenly home.

Home is not simply a mark upon a map anymore than a river is simply water. It is a place at the center of the compass from which every arrow radiates and where the heart is fixed. It is a force that forever draws us back or lures us on. For where the home is, there lies hope. And the future waits and everything is possible.  -Jennifer Worth, Call the Midwife