Everyone has a place to call

Titus 2:3-5 states, “Home is where the heart is.” I don’t know when I came to understand the meaning of that verse. But, after having lived in 40 states and visited numerous other places, I think Titus was right.

An acquaintance asked me where my home was, and I told her my current address at the time. “No,” she said, “where is your home?” When I looked puzzled, she expanded on her thought by saying, “You know, where you grew up—where you go to celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas.”

I have always had difficulty imagining what it must be like to have been born and then live one’s entire life in the same town with the same people from cradle to grave, or at least from cradle to adulthood.

I went to 12 schools in 10 years and attended four different high schools by my junior year. My college experience was the first time I entered school as a Freshman and graduated as a senior four years later with the same people.

Would living in the same place with the same people be boring? Or simply familiar? Would it mean never getting lost and maybe knowing different paths that lead to the same place? Would it be comforting—aware that everyone knows all important and miniscule facts about you? Or might that awareness be confining precisely because everyone knows everyone else?

Perhaps more importantly, does everyone deserve to call a certain place home? Unequivocally, I say yes! And, given how strongly I feel that each person deserves to have a home, it should come as no surprise that I devote myself—as a realtor—to helping others sell and buy their homes. Those places are not the same as mine—some are larger, some are smaller, some prettier, some not my style at all, and those differences are ok.

“Home is where the heart is?” For me—and perhaps for others in our mobile society—home is best described as that NEST of familiar shapes, scents, pictures, and mementos that we have collected over time and surround ourselves with, and that represent the different phases of our lives. A nest, if you will, with the same feathers, no matter in what tree that nest happens to be built, in whatever forest that tree is located.