Finding a Place Called “Home”

 

Most of us have moved multiple times, occupying many homes over the span of a lifetime. My first abode was a small apartment in Berkeley, California; my bed, a dresser drawer in my parent’s bedroom!

 Dad was playing football and attending classes at Cal Berkeley through the GI bill. Mom worked various jobs, but after I was born, stayed home to take care of me. When Dad finished school, the family moved to Hayward, where he was hired on as a high school football coach.

Our new house was big enough to accommodate the three of us and eventually, my brother and sister. My only memories of it are from pictures in the photo albums mom faithfully kept—a front room window that she decorated for Christmas using soap and paint, and a swing set in the back yard where I spent hours swinging and trying different tricks that sometimes resulted in a scraped nose or chin from planting my face in the dirt!

After I finished Kindergarten, Dad took another coaching job at Bakersfield Junior College. Along with our dog and many belongings, we five crammed into our station wagon, following Grandpa in his camper for the move some 270 miles away.

My family remained in Bakersfield, living in three different homes there. Each house was bigger than the former one, due to the arrival of the twins, born when I was in the eighth grade.  After junior college, I left home and moved south where I shared a dorm room for the next two years while working towards my Bachelor’s Degree at UCLA—tight quarters, but my room-mate and I got along just fine.

 During my fifth year there, I roomed with four other girls in a two bed-room, one bathroom apartment near the campus.  That was a tight squeeze too; but again, we all got along well, shared a common faith in the Lord and had much fun together.

Since our apartment overlooked the Veteran’s cemetery, we rose to “ Reveille” in the morning, heard “Taps” every evening and sometimes the loud bangs of the 21-gun salute! 

I lived in many different accommodations during my single life, including moving back in with my family for a time in Bakersfield, and then into a double-wide mobile home with my sister and her son during the late 70’s and early 80’s.

When Al and I got married in 1982, I moved into his two-story Tudor style home in Porterville, northeast of Bakersfield. Five years later, we found a ranch house on almost two acres of property in the community of Springville, where we resided for the next thirty years.

We loved it there and had no plans to leave… that is until one Thanksgiving when our daughter, Shanda, and her husband brought up the idea of moving to Michigan to be closer to  their family.

At their urging and with much prayer and discussion, we put our house on the market after returning from Michigan. We were shocked when it sold quickly and had to hastily search for a new home in absentia, with the help of Shanda, Chris and the realtor. 

 That was six years ago. Our Michigan house has worked out fine, and it’s great living in close proximity to Shanda and the family.

How much longer will we be here? Only the Lord knows the answer to that question.

But Jesus did promise His followers a permanent home with Him in heaven. Death wasn’t to be the end, but rather the passageway from this life to the next—either to life with God, through faith in Jesus or life separated from God forever.

 I’m looking forward to my heavenly home. Have you made your choice?

“‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?’ Jesus answered, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” John 14:1-6 NIV

(pictured above, after a storm...our house in Springville CA; below, Dad and Judy in Berkeley, CA; and our most recent house in Michigan)