New Perspectives

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Keith Reynolds

I have a friend who often asks me when we see each other “are you home tonight?”  He is a man of few words, so his question always catches me.  Am I home tonight?  Earlier in our friendship he would ask me “where’s your home?”  

These are two questions that go to the heart of being human.  Am I home tonight?  What I hear in the question is am I too busy to be at home?  Am I too preoccupied with other things to miss the chance to be home?  Or is it that I have an address but cannot be found there.  I am lost; adrift in the waves of life which lap me upon other shores.  Sure I may be home, in the living room or the kitchen but my mind is elsewhere and my attention is far from this place.

To be home somewhere is one of the great gifts of life.  We can create a home, a place to belong.  We can decorate, paint, build and fashion a home to suit our tastes.  We can remodel, change and move things around in order to satisfy our desire for a home to look a certain way.  A home can be a room or a place that has many rooms.  To have a home is a gift.

It is also true that a home creates us.  By living in a place for a while, it begins to shape us.  We may live by ourselves or with others and the same reality is true: our home informs who we are.  As much as we might influence what our home looks like, we are changed because we live there.  We are shaped by where we live.  

But are we at home?  It can be hard to be at home.  Homes can be lonely, violent and unsafe.  A home can have hard memories attached to them.  The reality of home may be nothing close to the dreams we had for what it could be for us.  So we keep looking.  We hope for something different.  Or we live with great disappointment and sadness.

Where’s your home?

It may be an address with an apartment attached to it.  A number on the side of your house.  A name fixed on your door.  Maybe this is where you make your home for now.

Being at home in the world is one of the basic human desires for each of us.  Some of us find it quite easy to find our place.  Some of us live with a lifelong struggle to be at home somewhere.

Home may be a geographical place.  Home may be something inside of you.  Wherever it is or is not, you and I are who we are because of something called home.  Where’s your home?  

Are you home tonight?

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Thursday, October 27, 2011