Traveling... home again

I’m on my way home from a Board meeting at Christmount in Black Mountain, NC. I seem to be doing a lot of traveling lately. Friday I leave for our Conference Center in Silver Springs for a weekend youth retreat. … It will be good to be home for a while.

Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy traveling. It’s good to see new places. It’s good to meet new people and learn more about life outside my small corner of space. (I figured out the other day that I’ve lived in Jacksonville for 22 years now – that’s longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere.) But there’s something to be said for “home.”

Home – that place where you are known. A place of family and friends. A place where you can rest comfortable in the knowledge that you belong; not because your “things” are there, but because there are people there who love and support you, who share your tears of joy and sorrow, who cheer you on and then challenge you to go further.

I am blessed to have several of these places. In Jacksonville with my husband and son, and extended family. In Bradenton with my extended family. In Jacksonville with my friends and church. In Florida with the youth and adults of the YMC and CYF.

But I also have found that each place I go, whether it’s California or North Carolina or…, I find a piece of home there, too. I find there a sense of belonging, because God is in that place – and where God is, I know I can belong. Perhaps it’s not something I can see or touch as easily as I can where my family is. But it is there, nonetheless; there deep inside me – that invisible connection with a people and a place because I believe, I know in the core of who I am, that through God we are all one. And that is the best belonging any of us can have.