Another 'new' home

I am once again packing my life into boxes, to then unpack them in a new room. Luckily, this time I'm only moving from one wing of Westminster College to another wing, but it is still a task which is far from fun. However, as I sit in my new room I am struck how 'at home' I already feel.

The importance of feeling ‘at home’ has been an issue that has again raised its head for me over the last few weeks. In conversations I have had with new students, I have been reminded of the struggles I had during my first term at Westminster. The struggles of where was home and how do I, if I have to, make this place home. The importance of ‘home’ is one of the reason why I chose to remain in the college grounds with the builders, rather than move out to rented accommodation else where in Cambridge. Westminster has become ‘home’, and ‘home’ is a stability that I find I need when the rest of my world is in chaos. If I know where home is and know I can get back there easily, then I know I can get through everything else. Maybe this seems a bit strange coming from a person who has led a fairly nomadic life and who will continue to live such a life. In my 32½ years, I have lived in six cities on a permanent basis and have had prolonged stays in at least two others. I have already moved house more times than the national average for the lifetime of a Briton! Therefore, home you would not think is something I would find important. But it is, and maybe even more so than for a person has lived in the same place their whole lives. I don’t really have a hometown—I have a town I was born in, because for the time I live somewhere, however long that might be, that place becomes my hometown. It becomes the place where when I get of the train I say, "I’m home". And when I move on, the transition is never an easy one—but what makes it slightly easier is God. In faith I have moved, particularly in most recently years when I have controlled where I live, and through faith I have a spiritual home—a home that goes with me wherever I am and gives me sanctuary from the tumultuous storms of life.

So from my ‘new’ home to you in your home
may God continue to bless the places we call home.