When I was growing up, I knew where home was.

Home was where I lived with my parents and my two brothers and two sisters.

From the time I was three years old until I started high school, home was at 1107 Sunset Drive in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Home was that charcoal gray house with the garden in the backyard surrounded by lilac bushes.

Home was where Dad had planted those yellow rose bushes and Spanish olive trees in the yard.

Home was the place where that old school bell from my mother’s childhood schoolhouse sat atop the big wooden box that Dad built.

It was the old bell that Mom would ring when she wanted to call us home for dinner.

Home was the place where my family lived….

Where we slept and ate and played and laughed and cried together…..

Home was where we listened to Mom read to us…

Where we learned to read for ourselves….

Where we all learned to love to read.

Home was where we learned to draw and paint and sculpt and be creative.

Home was where we watched TV together and congregated together for holiday meals….

Where we felt safe with one another…. that warm spot out of the cold from North Dakota winters.

When I was growing up, I knew where home was.

Home was where love grew…

And grew…and grew.

Years ago, I met a lonely little girl in a children’s home in Northern Arizona.

When she was asked where “her home” was, she got a strange look on her face.

She wasn’t really sure where home was.

“I don’t know,” she said, and then she listed a number of places where she had “stayed” all across the Navajo Reservation over the few years of her young life.

She had lived in foster homes, group homes, boarding schools and shelters all over Northern Arizona in her 11 years.

She had stayed in Ganado, Wide Ruins, Indian Wells, Polacca, Klageto, and numerous other places, wherever the Tribe could find her a bed.

Back when I first met her, she was staying at an emergency shelter on the weekends, and during the week she stayed at a tribal boarding school on the Reservation.

She knew that those places were not her “home.”

Every place she stayed was just temporary.

She was just passing through.

My heart breaks for children like her.

My heart goes out to children in the foster care system, scattered all over the country, many of them are right here in our community.

They go from place to place, from shelter to shelter, from available bed to available bed, but they know they aren’t HOME yet.

The late singer/songwriter, Jim Reeves, recorded an old gospel song that goes like this:

This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. The angels beckon me from Heaven’s open door, And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

Oh Lord You know I have no friend like you, If Heaven’s not my home then Lord what will I do. The angels beckon me from Heaven’s open door And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

As a Christian, I know that Jesus has gone to prepare a Heavenly Home for me.

In John 14:2-3, Jesus said, “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”

I know the Lord has plans for me…plans to prosper me and not to harm me…plans to give me hope and a future…

Plans for a Heavenly Home…not temporary but for all eternity.

The writer of Hebrews, and also Apostle Peter, said that those who are the faithful are only “strangers and pilgrims” on Earth…

We are on our way Home.

Unlike my little friend I met years ago in Arizona, I have a comfortable home today where I gather with my family.

I feel safe and comfortable here.

But I do know that this is just temporary too.

I have a Heavenly Home awaiting me, and I pray my little friend will find her Forever Home there too.

I pray the same for you.