Being known.
I think this has become my working definition of "home".
For those of us blessed to have grown up in a home, we have fond memories of our childhood. The feeling of home came as our parents knew us better than we knew ourselves. They knew how we needed to be loved, how to push us and challenge us, how to give some tough love. They knew our triggers, they loved us despite our ornery attitudes. We were truly known, even when we got to be teenagers and we thought our parents didn't understand us at all.
Home was the feeling and reassurance that we were truly known and truly loved unconditionally.
Then, as nature should have it, we moved out. We left home behind and we journeyed into a world that didn't know us. Some of us sort of felt known within sorority clubs or through athletic teams, but there still seemed to be a piece of us not quite fully known. So we journeyed forward into adulthood; desiring to be known, but unsure of how.
For most of us, love is how we eventually found home again and I suppose at the root of this post being known is being loved and loving in return. -To be known, loved, and accepted for you; the good and bad. To be able to be the goofy, dorky self that you would never be with anyone else accept with those few who feel like "home". It's the freedom to have a good day, a bad one, to laugh like a child, to let out a stinky fart, or to just be and to still be perfectly content with those who truly know you. -Feeling known for all your beautiful imperfections is home.
We long for this feeling in and through our days on earth. The older we get, perhaps the more we truly long to be known. Sometimes we bask in the beauty of feeling at home -a season of bliss. Other times we sit in a season of restlessness and loneliness, wandering in the forest hoping that someone will take a few minutes to sit and talk just so we can get a taste of home again. There is a part of me that wonders if this is how it has always been and how it is designed -longing for the next taste of home. No matter how well known we feel, there is a small part of us that knows we can never truly be known...
...and that keeps us searching for our ultimate home.
