home, house, remember

Home again, home again, jiggity-jig.

Someone asked me a few days ago if this place where I am right now (Missouri) feels like home. I made the mistake of saying, "Yeah, well... the house is home, but not the city." She corrected me and said, "I would think that the people are the home and the house is just a place." That's true, too. In the Hallmark card kind of way, the idea that "home is where the heart is" translates into "home is where there are living and breathing people who love you." I think too, however, that the atmosphere of "home" can depend--even if slightly--on the setting. Not just the people, but the place.

Of course, I could be entirely wrong here. Maybe I'm slipping into the mindset of a 21st century American (capitalist) who believes comfort to be a right. I don't want to be this person. I think I must have been wrong before... but, I'm still stuck with my original notion that this house, where I will remain for the next two months and where my parents live, feels like home. The little material possessions that accompanied me through my growings-up -- such as the paper-mache butterfly that I shaped and painted in the second grade, the cow-skin drums that we've had since leaving Kenya and that we've used as coffee-tables throughout, the black upright piano I learned to play on -- these things carry memories, just as people carry memories.

A professor of mine from this semester suggested that, for humans, one of our greatest fears is that we will reach a point in life when no one else remembers what we remember. What seems meaningful to us will, eventually, find no place in the memories and minds of those surrounding us. Now, I don't know to what extent I believe this as reality; but, it certainly sounds like a reasonable fear for many people. With regard to the objects, such as those that I named above, these items seem full of data -- memories, records of their creation, use, and location --; yet, who, but the living being that enabled those memories and instances into being, will retell and remember those things.

Believers have got it a little easier, I think. Two reasons: we can recognize that this life lasts only a short time and that our stuff won't go with us into eternity with Jesus; and also, though everyone around us may forget who we were and what we did or what accompanied us through various situations, Jesus-God-the Holy Spirit all remember and were there beside us. He probably remembers better than we do... and doesn't compare who we become with who we were -- not like the world does, anyway. Hmmm...