For the first few years after we moved to Sweden, whenever we would visit the UK it was reasonably common for people to ask us, ‘Is it nice being home again?’ and we knew what they meant.

Except, of course, we weren’t home.

Home at its most basic is your place of permanent residence, so we weren’t home. Home however has more to it than your postal code, which is why we can say of someone or somewhere that ‘we felt right at home’. Home is a place of security and comfort, it is the place we love and are loved (or at least should be). Home is the place where we retreat from the difficulties of the outside world and home is the place where we invite the world in. Home is the place that roots me in the world and is one of the few places that we get to express who we are – our rooms, spaces and houses become perhaps our biggest display of the kind of people we think we are. Most of all home is the place where I feel I belong.

It is these kinds of feelings and associations that make marriage and family breakdown all the more painful when we realise that the place of comfort, nurture, nourishment, safety and love is no longer a place ‘where I feel at home’. I’m saying I no longer belong.

We have made our home in a suburb of Stockholm and we feel comfortable, we are beginning to feel like we belong, we feel at home.

Home is an interesting idea when seen in the  light of the biblical story of humans cast out of their first and most ideal home, away from where they most belonged. The next thousand years or more trace a wandering people, nomadic but searching for a place to call home, the powerful pull of a promised land. Home, exile, home again and exile. It’s no surprise to see people fight for a land they can call home.

Jesus also challenged our notions of home. He challenged it because the Son of Man had no place to lay his head (Lk 9:58) and that those who would follow him must be willing to abandon their homes (Lk 9:61-2). Heaven is our home, we are now strangers and sojourners, we are just passing through (1 Peter 2:11-12). I’ve spent many a year railing against the passive comforts of home and urging a form of radical obedience that demands giving it up.

Yet Jesus spoke of parables where the master was away and would then come home, clear references to the return of Christ (Lk 12:36) or Paul speaking of being home in the body (2 Cor 4 & 5). So where is it? Where is the place that the followers of Christ should feel at home?

We should feel at home on earth, for it is the place we were made for, the place we were given to work and create, to go forth and multiply, to be fruitful image bearers of God around the world. One day the earth will be renewed and we will call it home. Creating homes for families to flourish and grow, places to express our creativity and uniqueness, places that image the kingdom of God to others through hospitality and love then are vitally important. Much more important than I used to think.

However, it is not the place where we ultimately find our identity, our purpose, our safety or our salvation. That is in loving God (Jn 14:23) where Jesus and the Father through the Spirit come to make their home with us and it is in that home that we find ourselves loving and being loved. Everything else follows on from that.

Because of this love, I am not shaken when I am stirred to move from one country to another like a modern-day Abraham with a satnav. Because of this love the price of leaving is not nearly as great as the reward of following and wherever I go I am at home.