If you know me you know two things about me: I love home and I'm very, very, very forgetful.
If you don't know me, you think I'm a tri-color website full of run-on sentences and cyclical thoughts.

I am going home in a very short time: a little more than twenty-four hours. Of course, by the time we've driven the twenty-two hours to get there, it will be more like two days until I actually am home, but nonetheless, I'm going. I opened my inbox today to an email from my best friend. This is what she said: Thursday night, Liz and others will be gathering in my little home for little bits of food and mostly just loving and laughing. Of course, you're the central figure, because we all want you back home as badly as you want to be here! And, while we all know that I am not prone to liking the central figurine status, the thought of seeing all my lovely friends in a little apartment with a grand piano and candles and the smell of home is just too anticipatory for me to not think about in the meantime.

I've felt a little out of place the past few weeks. Catching myself in a group of people, suddenly quiet, with nothing to say. Catching myself on the verge of melancholy, awaking suddenly when someone says "What's wrong?" When people used to ask me that question I used to answer "Nothing." But I've learned the hard way that answering that way only pulls me deeper into nothingness. I have to shake off the interior loneliness and walk with obedience to the joy set before me.

I kept thinking that the loneliness I was feeling was due to the shortening time until I could walk through my own front door, hold my hands over the woodstove, wake up bleary eyed to the smell of raspberry muffins and coffee, knowing that the people around me love me even when I'm bleary eyed. I kept thinking that the loneliness I was feeling would dissipate the moment I walked into that little apartment where two people I love live. I convinced myself that the feeling of aloneness would deteriorate the moment I stood sixth row back, left side, aisle chair, and sang my heart out in my own church. I told myself last night, sitting in a room full of people I've come to love but still hold a little of myself back from, that in only a few more days I would be with the people to whom I've given all of myself.

I've been lying to myself.

Home is where my heart is, and so I've logically deduced that home is Potsdam, New York. Home of Sergi's Pizza, The Fields, P&C, and my school. Home is the brick farmhouse on Country Route 47 in Norwood, where the woodstove is hot to the touch and my small green room is cold without me. Home is my local church, Christian Fellowship Center, and all of the people I respect so much I'm sometimes overwhelmed. Home is the Sinclair's, where we ice rum logs and laugh loudly and eat Java Chip too late at night. Home is Benjamin's eyelashes giving me butterfly kisses. Home is where my heart is.

Because sometimes my heart loses sight of its real home. Sometimes I look back, like the people in the book of Hebrews had opportunity to do, but as it was, they desired a better country, a heavenly one. And because of that God was not ashamed to call them His own. Hebrews 11.15,16 But then I close my eyes and count to ten and try hard to not be desperate for the familiar, the comfortable, the known. Because there is One who is more familiar, more comfortable, and more knowing than anything I could ever have at home. And I want Him to be proud to call me His own.