“Oklahoma! You’re a long way from home.”
I was in the grocery store with my wife Saturday, and on Saturdays, during college football season, I ALWAYS were a shirt bearing my team’s insignia, “OU,” or “Oklahoma Football,” in their colors, crimson and cream. Whenever I’m tempted to purchase another OU T-Shirt (long or short sleeved, I’ve got both), hoodie, or sweatshirt, my wife gently reminds me that I already have an entire drawer full of “OU stuff.”
The man in the grocery store simply saw, “Oklahoma” emblazoned on my sweatshirt and was responding to that.
I hadn’t thought about it in years.
I’m from Oklahoma, but it’s no longer my home; it hasn’t been for quite some time.
I left Oklahoma when I was 18, spent the next 7 years in Texas, then moved on to other places: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Alabama, back to Oklahoma, then on to Louisiana, before moving again to Kentucky.
Maybe it was after we had our first child, while in Kentucky, or perhaps the second, born in Alabama, that Oklahoma no longer seemed like home. By the time my mom and dad moved from Altus, OK., where I grew up, to their long-term care facility in Lubbock, TX, home had long ceased to be where my parents had raised me.
What is home anyway? Where is it?
The number of moves I’ve made is not by any means out of the ordinary for our culture: the average American will move 11.4 times during the course of his or her lifetime.
Is home where you are from? It is where you’ve lived the longest? Is it where you pay your taxes? Or is it where you will retire? Is it where you die?
In his blog “Where is Home?” writer Mark Matousek explored the concept of home from a spiritual and philosophical standpoint. “Home is not only where we hang our hat,” he said, “but also where we find our heart.”
British-born essayist and novelist of Indian origin, Pico Iyer, in his TED talk titled, “Where is Home?” discussed the concept of “home,” noting that 220 million people live in countries not their own.
“Where you come from now is much less important than where you’re going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It’s the place where you become yourself,” Iyer says.
If home is where you find your heart, if it’s where you become yourself, then where is that? Where is “home”?
I visited my mom again recently in her very comfortable retirement center. She has access to nurses 24/7. She can join others for meals in an attractive dining hall, or if she chooses, she can have breakfast, lunch, or supper brought to her room. She has the availability of social activities among people in her same or similar situation.
“But it’s just not ‘home,’” she has reminded me.
Years ago, when she and Dad first moved there, she pensively commented that she always thought she would die, “at home.”
Is home that place where we are, or were, most connected with family and friends?
If that’s “home,” it will always be changing, and never be the same, since people and places change. Mom’s home—where she spent most of her adult life, in Altus, OK., is not what it was when she lived there, because the people have changed, or died. And Mom is not the same, either; neither are you or I.
The One who never changes has promised us he will ALWAYS be with us, no matter where we are, or how our bodies age—regardless what place we call home.
Maybe that’s it: home is ultimately where He is.
The famous evangelist of the 19th century, D.L. Moody, would frequently use Will Thomson’s song, “Softly and Tenderly,” as an invitation hymn during the evangelist’s revival meetings. When Moody was on his deathbed, he called for Thompson. He came and tenderly sang the words:
Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling—
Calling for you and for me;
Patiently Jesus is waiting and watching—
Watching for you and for me!
“Come home! come home!
Ye who are weary, come home!
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling, O sinner, come home!”
Moody knew he was a but a pilgrim about to journey to his true “home.”
But it had always been there, in the deepest sense, within him.
That is home indeed, traveling within us as we journey to it; home where we are welcomed; home where we belong.