Home, the images of which can produce strong feelings of belonging and security for most of us. For me, home is where I sleep. Where I am the most like myself. I don’t have to put on polite faces as I do at work or in public. I can walk around with bare feet and holes in my jeans. It is where I store my important things and my keepsakes. A place for gatherings and celebrations. It is a place where I keep my books. It is where I raise my children and love my soul mate. It is where my now grown child and grandchildren come when they are homesick.

Home. I love home. I know that in a blink of an eye this place that I love, this place where I am safe, this place that is my most favorite place to be can be gone in an instant….It has already happened before.

My home was not always in the house where it is now. It is where those bare feet of mine walked on the fine white sand of the long driveway from the steps of the school bus or the mailbox outside the gate to the back screen door. I can almost smell the aromas from the kitchen now, where my Me-Ma Powell is standing over the stove stirring a pot of who cares what… but I know it is good stuff. My Pe-Pa is over by the window at his desk with the light on and the magnifying glass hovering over the pages of the Gospel.

From off down the other end of the house faint sounds of piano keys float to my ears as I recognize the tune of some familiar hymn that my mother is playing in the living room on the Baldwin. I know she has her eyes closed and is smiling as she plays. Behind her, the fire-place will be flickering. I can see it, smell it, hear it….Home…It’s all gone now.

My grandparents are in heaven and someone else lives in my grandparents’ house. I am down the road about four miles from that house, but it might as well be in another country. That is how far away it feels. Nothing is the same, not now.

Everything we love and have is so very temporary. It will all disappear and be gone…it can happen in a second…in the next minute or in a few years. Either way it will all be gone. That is the nature of this world. This planet is only a temporary place to call home.

Even with all of this, I know that there is a place where the feeling of belonging, love, and security feels even stronger and real. Those who are no longer here are there. That place that no longer is there waiting for me to walk in the door with a clap of the screen is there. A forever home, a place that will never go away and leave me heartbroken or homesick. I know it exists on another level.

I have a theory that heaven is just that…home. All the good feelings of home will be what we feel in heaven. Being in the presence of God will feel better than any home on earth. To praise Him, love Him and be loved by Him is to be home…forever home.

I believe in home.

~Lori O’Gara