Home...

I love home.  I love being here.  I love knowing it's here after a long day of running everyone around.  I love locking the door with us on the inside.  I love knowing that every night at about 10 o'clock my whole family is tucked in their beds all under the same roof.  {Not the same now that one of us is a full time college student, and only sleeps in his bed about four months out of the year...} 

My love for home isn't about how it looks or the stuff I have inside it.  It's not even about the four walls that hold a physical building together.  It's more about a place of refuge.  Refuge from the stresses that the outside world puts on me...from having to live up to other's expectations and allows me to just be ME.  

HOME is the state of being comfortable and content.  It's a place where I contemplate who I am and who I am becoming.  Home affords me the ability to stop.  

To rest.  

To refuel. 

I want my children to grow up with this kind of HOME as their heritage.  I want them to look back on the years they spent living at HOME as some of the best years of their lives. When they look back on these years, I want them to think fondly of the great times the four of us have had together...but I also want them to remember the faces of others who have come through here, too.

I want to foster the kind of HOME where those who consider this their permanent address enjoy it as much as those who come in and out to visit.  I want the echoes of laughter and the memories of heartfelt conversation to bounce off the walls of this place for years to come...and in the hearts of my children forever.

It's a strange thought that years ago my own parents, who lived within these same four walls, may have said these same things about HOME.  It must be why I remember missionaries coming and going, and friends stopping by to visit.  And it must be why I have this need in me to share my space, and the peace I find here, with others.  I want my doors to be open and the contents of my kitchen to be shared. 

These days, most of the visitors are twenty and under and have a preference for things like cookies and chips...and I like it that way. I hope in some way these visitors will look back on their memories and also see that this was a place that afforded them moments in time to see how HOME should be.

I have a {secret crush} over a writer named Donald Miller.  He's somewhat unconventional and sometimes makes me stop and contemplate everything I think I feel strongly about.  He loves Jesus freely and honestly.   I know nothing about the four walls he calls HOME..but he wrote THIS on his blog today and I'm pretty sure I get it...and like it.

So, I ask you...what is HOME to you?

“Home is the most popular, and will be the most enduring of all earthly establishments”

Channing Pollock