home

Home is a weird thing. Home, meaning the place you grew up in. Is that home? Or is home where the heart is, as they say?

When I come home, for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Spring break and summer, I feel like I’m transported to the past. My “home” is the place where I grew up, where I had the same friends for eighteen years and experienced heartbreak and sadness and joy and freedom. But I was also chained, as many of us were, growing up. Not by my family, not by my friends- by my own mind. I battled depression for so much of my life, but didn’t even know to call it that. I was unhappy in middle school and high school. That’s why coming home can be so painful sometimes; seeing the places that caused me so much angst and anxiety. But it gets easier every time, and now home is different than it was. Now I can come home and feel peaceful, not anxiety-ridden. Now I can drive past my high school, where I spent so much time hating myself, and feel a separation. There is no emotional attachment anymore, or at least only a remnant.

The problem was me, it was always me. And when I come home, it’s easy to revert back into that old me, the me that I am no longer. Something about family can bring out the worst in us- but it can also bring out the best in us if we will let it. If we will let our homes not ensnare us and keep us chained but rather experience the freedom of overcoming those old ways and remembering that we are new creations, we are not who we used to be, then home can be an old place and a new place. A place of redemption.

Sometimes I don’t like who I am when I come home. I fight with my brother, act entitled and materialistic, and fall back into old habits. But each time, I bring with me parts of my new self- my new interest in nutrition which allows me to connect with my mom in a different way; my understanding of politics and world news which helps me have intelligent conversations with my dad; my new sense of humor to joke with my brother. Although I may have once been ignorant and selfish, I have changed, and I have to remember that. I have to remind myself constantly that I am not who I was, because that is the Devil’s favorite way of capturing us: making us believe we can never change. He is terrified that we can and do change, because then he has no power over us. Then we never have to allow those things that used to bind us hold us anymore. God has created us new and changed and with God on our side, who can be against us?

I am so grateful for the way I was raised, the privilege I had and still have. I have more than I could ever possibly need or want, and that is not something I need to feel guilty about. Rather, God asks me to give, and give abundantly, all that I have. He asks me to be a steward, and a steward I shall be. I am growing and changing and learning, but it is good to have a reference point to come back to every now and then.