Home?

"When are you heading home?" "You going home this weekend?" "I might be going home for a few weeks this summer."
These are all things that you hear frequently when you live in a college town like I do. It's strange, but I assume that these sentiments come from people who have at least outwardly Pristine families. It is different for me though. Do not get me wrong, I Love my family a lot, but it is not at all cookie cutter. Santa Barbara is more of my home than anywhere else, but I engage in the lingo. I say "I'm going home this weekend," but it is more because "I'm going back to the city that I grew up in" is far too verbose. All this to say, I often feel a tad nomadic, and I have posed the question many times to people-at what point are you no longer going home, and instead going to visit family? Nobody seems to have a clear answer, and perhaps there is not one.
But I feel like the point is that we need reconsider our definition of "home," because for me it is where I live, in a Podunk, ghetto, overcrowded, college town. This is my home, and when I leave, I am never going home, but leaving home. Philosophically though, it is a question as to what "home" actually is-where the heart is? where your family is? wherever the individual chooses? a physical building? I honestly do not have an answer. I just am commenting that all of this lingo seems incorrect to and for me. Some small part of me thinks that home is somewhat impossible to define, especially without a wife and kids. Then you bring in more lingo "oh, he went home home." It all just gets lost on me.
Final thoughts: I am so very glad that I do not belong to this place, not the house that I am writing this in, that is up for debate, but to this plant, this world itself. I was made for somewhere greater, and that is my home, my heavenly home. No matter where I am here I am simply passing through, and I so look forward to the day that I am able to be truly home. Regardless of how you define family, my father will be there, and that is enough for me. I trust Him and if the house that He is preparing for me is half as beautiful as He is, I have much to look forward to.