This is Faith in Play #91: Home, for June 2025.
Thanks to Bryan Ray for recommending the Min/Max Podcast. This topic comes from their second episode, some years back, which I just heard.
The Min/Max Podcast got me thinking about home–not my home, specifically, but home as a concept, the place where we feel like we belong. That is different for each of us. One of the pod panelists commented that from his back door all he can see is miles of unbroken prairie, and that open wilderness feels like home to him. For others, home is the suburbs, or the cities, or the farmlands. What makes it home seems to be memories and family. Home is the place where we feel secure, because it is the place where we were first loved and protected. As the gunstar is passing through the caves inside an asteroid, Navigator First Class Grig comments to Starfighter Alex Rogan that they remind him of home, because he and his wifoid (and ten thousand little griglets) live underground. Home is where you feel comfortable, where everything feels familiar and safe.
Not everyone had that experience, and not everyone ever really feels “at home” anywhere; but children are resilient, and most of us connect feelings of security to the kind of place where we were raised.
There is a subtext in our Christian faith that suggests that while we are here in this world we are not really home, that home awaits us after death. This is not a unique concept to Christianity; there are other religions that believe in something like heaven, an afterlife for the souls of select men and women. These afterlife scenarios vary, reflecting that which is valued by the believers. Some are cities, some are open fields or forests. Valhalla is a place where the chosen fight all day and party all night. Even within the Bible we have several different images of what heaven will be like–the wedding feast of Jesus’ parables, the golden city of John’s vision. Home might be different for each of us, but when we get there we will recognize it as home.
It is similarly important to have a conception of what your character considers home, both because it will be in places like that where he will feel comfortable (and places unlike that where he will feel a bit out of place) and because it will probably color what he envisions as his ultimate destiny, both in terms of where he would wish to retire and in terms of what he expects for his eternal reward. In most cases it will be a place like that in which he spent his childhood. There will be some who imagine that they would be happier somewhere else, such as living as lord of a castle, but it is likely that ultimately people raised on the farm would be most comfortable returning to the farm, and genuinely uncomfortable living in the castle. It is a very unusual person who genuinely feels at home in a place that is not like the home he once knew.
Of course, there are people who have learned to carry that sense of home with them. People who were in some sense vagabonds, moving frequently–gypsies, military brats, missionary kids–learn to be at home wherever they happen to land. That may be a rare gift–but it may be something that others can learn. Oliver Wendell Douglas wanted to live away from the city on a farm in Green Acres, but his urban sophisticate wife Lisa was always trying to persuade him to move back to New York City and was never happy in the country. Adapting to somewhere unlike home as a new home is not so easy. It will be interesting to see how the first Mars colonists handle it. But it is not impossible.
So ask yourself what home means to your character, and whether he really understands that.
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