I put up a tree Saturday. I love the fresh smell of semi live trees. I usually cut my own but due to time constraints I picked one up from the Lions Club lot. It is already dropping needles at a rapid rate. Anyway, I am excited to celebrate Christmas at home this year with all four of my kids. You never know when the next Christmas will find us all together.
I got thinking about what HOME means for people. The secular Christmas songs all talk about being "home for Christmas." They talk of a longing for a time when you were comfortable and safe "at Home." Usually the longing is filled with nostalgia , which Spaulding Gray calls "a time in the past that never was." The Advent song we sing at 8:30Am goes "We have a Longing in our heart, O Lord..for comfort, for healing, for wholeness--hear our pray."This is a longing for a home with God.
Whoever said "you can't go home again" is on target. We cannot go back home because we have changed and our relationship to the past can never be replicated. Christams tugs at us because it has always symbolized familiar gatherings and full sanctuary's and familiar music and timeless tales. Since all these things get repeated every year--and everyone participates in the rituals-- the message of nostaliga and homecoming evolks an idealistic image of how our family connectedness should be like.
The question of the week is What is home for you?
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A college professor asked this question once, or something similar. And I walked the fence then and I'm walking it now. I want it both ways, Home is where you grew up, and it's where you live now.
Since my parents don't live where I grew up, I've moved "home" to where they live now, as well as where I live now my family. It's both the current physical location and the comfort of the past.
Home…it’s where ever you are. We have had lots of homes. It always took a while for it to feel like home but it becomes a home just by living there. We have lived in places that we didn’t want to call home. Our house in Biloxi, MS was very nice. We had a baby boy and a cocker spaniel. We looked like the happy young family from the outside. I hated living there! I didn’t want to make friends, I refused to hang a curtain, unpack pictures, I wouldn’t do anything to make that place home! I was pretty miserable because we had left Arizona and I love Arizona. I didn’t want to leave a place where we built a home (put in the lawn, painted the walls etc) . We took pictures to display! We made curtains and blinds for the windows. We bought a dog. We had our first son. This was really our first true home. I loved it. Leaving it was beyond heartbreaking.
A woman that I met in Biloxi told me that she made a point to make each place she lived a home (she is a few years older and had already been through leaving her first home). I thought she was crazy until we moved again. I loved leaving Biloxi and never wanted to feel that way again. Ben didn’t need that kind of home and neither did Paul and I. We needed every place we lived (or got stuck) to be our home. So, that’s what we do. We look back with fond memories but I really don’t want to go back there. I’m not the same person anymore, nor do I want to be.
This year, our home is missing an important member. She would be so angry with us if we spent more than a few minutes wondering what things would be like if we had her with us. She new all about making her family’s house a home. She made her home available to everyone of us. We will all take that as we go on and make our houses homes as well.
I look at our kids as they become men. Our years as 5 of us are numbered. I think we have a few family holidays left but I saw for the first time that they are getting their flight feathers. That’s exactly what I want them to have but it’s going to be painful. Home will change again! We will do what we do and hang the curtains, unpack the pictures and make the next place a different kind of home. And, with God's help, it will be good.
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