by Ann E. Bolson, D. Min.
If you had asked me when I was five years old, “Where is your home?” I would have quickly recited, “2348 Linden Drive, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.” Home was a geographical place when I was a child, and for many years thereafter. It was also a whole gestalt of memories and experiences: the fragrance of apple crisp in the oven, a wooded backyard full of wildflowers in the spring, a couple of rowdy brothers. Those brothers would be off to college by the time my folks decided to move to Kansas City. That house was never really home to me, though I lived in it for four years before going to college myself.
I see now that “finding home again” became a secret passion in my heart. I married my college sweetheart. We first rented an apartment, then a home, then bought an old house that we fixed up with energy and love. There were delightful features in the old place. Our children were babies there.
Then we were uprooted, as I had been as a child, by career advancement. We moved to Sioux Falls, SD, and through an early inheritance were able to build a house from the ground up. Such excitement. Such big stakes with every decision. People say home construction can wreck a marriage, but that was not the case for us. Perhaps recalling my childhood, we found a lot with a wooded back yard. Our children grew up there.
My call to ministry forever changed my concept of the word “home.” The toughest aspect of accepting this call was discovering that I would become itinerant, traveling from place to place. How I wept at leaving the home we had built. The Celts had a word for this, hiraeth, the extreme yearning for home that one experiences upon entering the ministry. Yet I have endured it, and have come to see that my husband and I can transform any place into a home. I now believe that home is not a geographical location, but a place in my heart where I am free to live authentically and in harmony with my deepest Self.
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