Home for the Weekend

Home is a place for exuberant joy and lots of jumping.

Where is your home?  I don't simply mean an address.  Where and with whom do you sense that you are truly "home"?  
When I proposed to my wife, people asked, "How do you know she's the one?"  My first response was, "She is my home."    

I was "home" in Minnesota over the weekend for my dad's surprise 60th birthday party.  And once again, we experienced all the notions of home.  There was intense laughter.   The telling of stories.  Eating way too much food.  The kids running barefoot in the backyard with grass-stained knees and kool-aid mustaches.  Bouncing on the neighbor's trampoline.   A slow game of bocce ball under a gently warm sun.  The re-living of shared experiences as we poured over old pictures and laughed at dad's hippie hair in 1972.

When you're "home," the day passes with no care for what the hour is.  There is no place to be but present in the moment.  At home you can be vulnerable because you are assured of safety.  "Home" has seen you at your worst.  There is nothing to hide.  At home, you are loved.  It matters not how you feel or what you look like.  You are loved regardless.  You don't want to leave home, but you know you must.  You have work to do.  So you go.  But you know you can always come back.

Much of Scripture is about a particular family, a particular land, and the hope of a home in its fullest sense.  The garden, the patriarchs, the kingdom, the city, the land, the feast.  God gives us people, places, and moments that provide identity, security, and meaning.  And in such "homes" we get a peek of the fullest of all homes.  

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