Home

For Christmas, I painted this sign for my husband. It's sort of a combination of us. He's a huge baseball fan (Go Braves!) and I love the Wizard of Oz. It's going to look great when we finally get it hung on the walls of our new house. Moving into this house over New Years' weekend got me thinking a lot about "home."
As I cleaned up the townhouse we had been renting, I thought about all the memories we had made there in such a short time. Less than six months really. My baby started walking, talking, sleeping through the night, climbing ... My little girl turned three, made a best friend, started drawing pictures that looked like more than scribbles, grew several more inches, I'm sure. We lost a mom. We gained new friends and church family. As I scrubbed marks off the wall from crayons, juice, miniature cars, keys, chairs, it almost overwhelmed me how much life we had crammed into that space in such a short time, despite it being temporary. It had still be a "home."
Most of our stuff is now in our new house. With us pulling some of our things out of the storage unit, I feel a bit like Maureen O'Hara's character in "The Quiet Man" (seriously, go watch that movie if you've never seen it) when her furniture is brought to her new house and she lovingly touches it and brushes off invisible dust particles. It's nice to have all our things about us. As I look around deciding where glasses should go, where pictures will hang, where to put furniture, etc., I know it's all things that will make this house into more than just a structure. It's making it into our home.
There are so many songs and sayings about home. "Who says, 'You can't go home?'" "There's no place like home." "Home is where the heart is." Everyone wants someplace to call home. It's a safe place, a place of belonging; where you can be yourself, let your hair down, run around into slippers and a paint splattered sweatshirt with your hair piled up every which way and no one will say anything because they all know it's just who you are.
A lot of people, when they think about "home," think about where they grew up. I can't really put my finger on one place that is more home to me than another growing up because we moved every few years. I have people I love in each place, but none of them pull on my heart much more than another. I guess where my grandparents have lived in Oklahoma is probably more home to me in that sense. But even that has me longing for more.
No matter how homey this house becomes as the boxes get unpacked and walls get decorated, no matter how many memories my family makes here, no matter how many years we live between these walls, I will still long for more.
Because my real home is in Heaven. And won't it be great to not have to unpack boxes when we move in there?