Home...or as close as we can get...

Little bit of cheesy coming at ya...but hey...I can rock cheesy...

I was emailing my friend yesterday.

And as I was emailing, this is what was coming out of my fingers...

I've been here long enough for things to change. I've been here long enough for circumstances to change. I've been here long enough for friendships and people to change. I've been here long enough for people to come and go. To move in and out and within...

I've been at work long enough to see someone go from the day they were hired to the day they resigned.

I've been in my apartment long enough that I want to start rearranging.

I've been at my church long enough to have gone in and out of multiple ministries.

I've been going to the same coffee shop long enough that the people who work there recognize me in the mornings.

I've been in this city long enough to know the traffic patterns, the shortcuts, and which stoplights take the longest.

I've been here long enough to call it home.

But...

Is this home on the days when all I want to do is jump in my car and drive the fifteen hours to get to the room where I lay in my bed and my cat curls up behind my knees? And where the smell of my mom's coffee is what gets me out of bed in the mornings?

Is this home on the days when my heart hurts for the mountains in the east. For the way it smells in the woods when it rains?

Is this home when I want to go sit on "my" dock at Lake Geneva?

Is this home when I look at a picture of a little girl named Avery who I really don't know all that well in the grand scheme of things but would love to watch her grow up? When I want to be in the presence of people who "knew me when"?

I think it is. I think home is something different than I ever thought it was.

I'm not away from home when I'm away from Austin anymore than I'm away from home now that I live 15 hours away from St. Louis, or farther from Ohio. Austin can be home regardless of the moving and shifting that comes simply with the rising and setting of the sun each day.

I think home is that place in your heart where the best of all your memories collide, the place where your mind goes when it needs to feel safe. I think home is the collaboration between all those people and places past, combined with those around you in this moment, who are growing you for the next step. Home is that place we take ourselves back to where everything stops spinning and we rest in every memory we know of stability. And if that's true, it goes with us, wherever we are. Home is not a place that I can run to or run from; it finds me wherever I am.