Musings on home

For this week's newsletter...or maybe next week's, since I'm running a lot late:

They say you can’t go home again, and in some respects that’s true. For Christmas, I’ll be going to a “home” I’ve never lived in. I didn’t grow up in the house my mother lives in now; she’s only lived there a few years. I still can’t find anything in the kitchen because it’s not laid out the way the kitchen was in the house I grew up in, but even so, it’s home.
It is home because that’s where we all meet up: my mother, my sister and brother-in-law and their daughter, Ben and me. It is home because of the love we bring to it. It is home because it’s where my sister and I have the same tired squabbles we’ve had our entire lives (except now sometimes we laugh at them). I think another cliché fits best here: home is where the heart is.
This year, I’m going back to another home at Christmas. Not only am I going to spend a few days with my family, I’m going to make a visit back to my home church on the Sunday after Christmas. I haven’t been back to Foundry UMC in Virginia Beach since I became a pastor a decade ago, and I’m curious to see who is still there, and what’s changed. I’m looking forward to it, to the little things like seeing if the sanctuary still looks the same (and if one of the lambs in the stained glass window still looks like it has only three legs) and what the renovations to the youth building look like.
It will be interesting to see how home-like that visit is. It's been a long time, and there's another kind of home for me, the home I make in each church I pastor. So when the holiday is over and it's time to leave Mom's home for my own, I'll be glad to be home in Beaufort and at Ann Street. Home truly is where our hearts are.