Elvis Presley immortalize through one of his song the phrase; home is where the heart is.
In a way our heart represents the home of love. In other words, home is where you find love and all its attributes, such as safety, comfort, acceptance, trust etc. we all need it, we all year for. Sometimes I asked myself but what happens then to the people who have the blessing to live in different parts of the world, or who have his of her family in other continents? The truth is that the world we live in today is not the world that was of our parents and grandparents where children and family stayed in the same city or town for many generations. Today, people move more, migrate, live in different cities or towns due to work, study or progress.
Right now I live in a small village in Germany that I call home. Birkenwerder is a cute little village in the outskirts of Berlin. Birken (as I called it) is a village that belonged to east Germany full of woods, lakes, and bicycle trials that make this place magical. I have a home here with my husband and my children where I turn on the fire in the winter and invite my friends for our garden parties in the summer and where today we will celebrate the beginning of the new years with friends and family. But with the same assurance I can call home, Michigan, Texas and a small town by the Mexican mountains where I was born and where my parents and siblings live.
The truth is that as you grow older, and get to know your friends for life, your partner, the children are born, you move and move and move again it feels like you are leaving parts of your heart in many places and with many people, and you can called each and single one of them home, home, home.
Last year is almost over, in few hours I will have a full house to say goodbye and to say welcome to 2020 and celebrate a new decade that starts tonight. Many of us have had great losses in the last decade, parents, children, uncles, aunts have said goodbyes because of death, we have cried, and we have laugh, we have welcome people into our lives and said our farewell to others. Some had married, others adopted children, the family has grown, others got sick, or feel old, or feel the end of life in near. The truth is that no matter what we experience the world keeps moving and the clock keeps ticking and we keep finding new homes.
For me this decade is countdown, countdown to be in my country and with my people which I call heaven. I like to think of this new world were sorrow, sadness, death will be no more like my permanent home. Being one day finally next to Jesus is where I wish my home to be and this is where my heart keeps looking at through the eyes of faith.
In the meantime, is time to say thank you, to close chapters, to say I love you or goodbye, to forgive. You and I are still alive and we can still, dream, desire, love, give, grow, and become a better mother or father, wife or husband, sister or brother, daughter or son and friend. I hope that our past will not be a stumbling rock but the kind of firm rock that will give us the necessary push to keep moving forward into a better future, into our permanent home.
