What is home? Is it a place? Or the people?
My home is people. It's my mom almost always around when I need to talk (even though sometimes she has to tell me to be quiet for awhile because my brain is machine gunning too many thoughts at her). It's my sister there to told the cute/obnoxious/funny thing one of the animals have done. My dad showing me he loves me in the strangest and best ways (like the time he sharpened all my new colored pencils). It's in South Carolina where my best friend lives. Wherever we go and adventure. And talk and just be. It's with her family in their small home. It's staying up late with her mom as she tries to make groundhog wedding cake toppers. It's in Virginia at my big brother's house for Christmas where he's decorated everything for our arrival. It's with my other big brother in another part of Virginia where I walked him down to the parking lot and watched him leave and realized that it's a lot harder to leave someone than to be left because I had gotten used to one but not the other.
But there is also significance in the place. Arriving at those other places is exciting but not the same excitement as when I come home. Home to the high-elevation desert. To the sagebrush, antelope brush, rabbit bush, cheat grass, and Spring wildflowers. To the Winter snow. To Summer's fresh fruit and the Autumn's apples. To the Winter's snow. To the house I've lived in for 20-something years. Sometimes I cling to the place because I know the people will not last forever. Both change through life, and sometimes I wonder why or how it is even possible.
My home is still with my parents. Other people's home is with siblings or grandparents. Eventually it changes to where their husband or wife is. Where their children are. Perhaps others feel their home is where their calling/career/job is (I suppose this is true for some people, but it would never satisfy me, or maybe it would have to, if it is God's will).
What about the people who are single all their lives? I do not exist solely to marry. I have a calling, and whether marriage works into that calling or not doesn't matter in the grand scheme, but the idea of a single life leaves me envisioning a lonely life because parents grow old and die. Siblings move on with their families. Places disappear. Things change, and a home is where you share your mundane life with others. To me, there is something that quiets my yearnings in the idea of sharing my life.
If my home is where my people are, how far would I go to be by my people? Two of my favorite people live on the other side of the country, but who is worthy of following? Who would I move for? They will most likely make families of their own, and that will change the dynamic of the friendship. They will find their own homes, where they belong. So where is it that I belong?
If you choose singleness, does that mean you choose not to be anyone's one? You are your own then, and maybe times of loneliness are inevitable even in a conscious choice.
Home is where a family shares life, or can a home exist without a family? How does one create a makeshift family when everyone else has a priority in their traditional one?
I guess all things are temporary. People, places, and home. But the yearning for a home doesn't ever go away because home is where you belong, where you feel at rest, where you are safe, and maybe an aching problem like this doesn't go away because we are still on the sunset side of Heaven.
What makes your home?
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