Home is where...

…they have to let you in.

…you hang your hat.

…your heart is.

Sometime in the next week or so (I don’t remember the exact date), David and I will have lived in Nashville for ten years. We moved here in June 1997 from Virginia. When we packed up our belongings, put them in a moving truck and headed west, I didn’t feel like I was moving to a new home. Instead I was leaving my home and heading for a great unknown. It took quite awhile for Nashville to feel like home. We lived with my in-laws at first and that wasn’t home. Several weeks later we got an apartment, but it still wasn’t home. A few years later we moved to a little duplex and that felt more like home but not quite. When JBelle was born, I was so crazy from the horomones and major life change that I was convinced that Nashville would never be home and that we needed to move south to Tampa to be with my parents. But we stayed, Nashville did indeed become home, and I’m very glad that it did.

There are still places that are home to me for various reasons. I wrote a few weeks ago about Blacksburg and Virginia Tech and how that is home for me. There’s also a camp in Pennsylvania that we go to every year. Last year, I wrote a poem about how that place is a home for my heart. I couldn’t share it on my blog last year, it was still too fresh and personal but time has passed and I feel stronger now.

Welcome Home

There is a saying that goes
Where you find your heart is home

This is most often said
to remind us that home is not always where we lay our head

As years go on and years go by
I have often come to find

Pieces of my heart have found homes
in places where I used to roam

I think our hearts find home in a few ways
not just in the places we live always

There’s a sleepy little town in Southwestern Virginia
And when I drive by I’m filled with nostalgia

Farther south in the sunshine state resides
a parental home of comfort and light

Some are the places we return to often
and others we regret we see so seldom

A piece of your heart may be left somewhere
and you find you long to once again tread there

I was warmly greeted the other day
with “Welcome Home!” for I had found my way

To another place where there is a part
of my grateful and oh so blessed heart

But “Welcome Home!” what an odd salutation
for isn’t camp only a week in duration?

A temporary home maybe, a transient abode
we come, we go, there is barely time to unload

But when we do leave, a bit of our heart stays here
making camp a home of our hearts year after year

For it’s not about little green cabins and dining hall meals
our hearts stay because of who we meet here

There are those in our cabins and those in the kitchen
those who teach Bible and those who will listen

And though we love dearly those who are The Boss
The one we truly meet here died on a cross

For camp would not hold our hearts the same way
Without The One who meets us here each day

Through Christ we have all come together
and it is through Christ we find a Savior

For upon this earth He once did roam
and one day He will say to us,

“Welcome Home!”

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