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Last week I took a trip down Memory Lane.  I didn’t enjoy it.  It’s not that there was anything bad down Memory Lane – In fact, I found it to be very beautiful!  It’s just that I don’t live there anymore.  I’ve moved.  I live on Here and Now Drive…and I like it here!  (I know, go ahead and roll your eyes.  What can I say?  I'm pretty cheesy sometimes.)

I’ve spent a lot of my life looking into the past or trying to plan my future while completely missing the present.  I’m tired.  I’m tired of living everywhere else but here, wherever here may be.  Right now, here is with my family and with God.

When my husband and I decided to move our family a few months ago, we planned on keeping our old house.  We thought it would be nice to have some place to go on the weekends, a place to enjoy nature, and a place for my husband to hunt later this year.  I was also thrilled at the thought of staying connected to the places and people I loved so much!

But then I started to feel torn.  I wanted to start settling into our new home and new town, but all I could think about was how much I wanted to go back to our old house.  I kept thinking of all the things that would be available to us if we still lived there, and resenting our new town for not offering the same things. 

And then I didn’t feel like I belonged to either place.  I definitely didn’t feel like I belonged here in our new town.  But when we took a weekend trip back to our old house, I didn’t feel like I belonged there anymore either.  It was surprisingly difficult to see how many things had happened and changed since we had moved, like I thought time would stand still while we were away or something.

Last week when I returned again for just a day, everything seemed so foreign that I may as well have never lived there.  I left feeling extremely depressed and couldn’t understand why what had been my home just months ago now felt like nothing but a distant memory.  On the car ride back to our new house, I found myself feeling very anxious to get home.  Home…Home?  Could this new house in this new town really be home?  Then I realized “home” wasn’t a house.  It wasn’t a town.  It wasn’t any place on this earth.

Home is where the heart is.  I know, I know.  How cliché.  But I believe it.  Over the past few months my heart has been at our old house and with our old friends and our old circumstances.  I also believe that home is where your hope is, and just like my heart, my hope has been misplaced over the last few months.  I started studying Colossians this week and have learned that our hope is stored up in Heaven, not on the things of this world, and that faith and love spring up from our hope (Colossians 1:5).  Spring up!  Isn’t that a great visual?!

I want faith and love to spring up in my life!  So I will put my hope in God.  I will keep my heart with God, and I will keep my heart with my family.  And you know what, I will always be at home - wherever I am.