Thoughts About Home: A College Student’s Journal

From Illinois, to Florida, to Minnesota, college really got me thinking about the idea of “home.” Here’s a little something I wrote a while ago, maybe you can relate:

Don’t wanna go
Don’t wanna leave this behind
But if I choose to stay
What will I never find?
Started planting roots
Just to leave high and dry
If home is a place,
Then where, God, is mine?

Is it where your roots are?
Have I gone too far?
Because where I’m from doesn’t feel like home
Maybe it’s where I plan to go?

You turn me around
Stop me in my tracks.
Easy there, tiger,
Take your foot off the gas
I hear a whisper
Sweet and low
“Stop looking out there,
Child, YOU are home.

You’re an open concept
With the best throw pillows,
I designed this house,
So I should know.
You’ve got natural light
From big windows
That face sunset every night,
Child, YOU are home.”

——————

I completed college over a span of 3 years, 3 states, 1,670 miles, and a lot of questions- in the midst of a global pandemic. 

After graduating high school in the Chicago area (2020’s drive-in movie theater style), I went to Southeastern University in Lakeland, FL for three semesters. From there, I decided to transfer to North Central University in Minneapolis, MN where I finished out my degree in Communication Arts and Business.

I learned and grew so much from my cross-country college experience. And although it was perhaps a bit more complicated than other students’ experiences, looking back, I don’t regret a thing. I know I would not be who I am today if I hadn’t learned so much from all the moving, the different locations, and all the people I’ve gotten to meet along the way. 

But perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned from my time in college is this:

YOU are home. 

I grew up in the same house my entire life until moving across the country to attend college. I moved to a state I knew nothing about and didn’t know a single soul at my school. I don’t think I would have admitted it in the moment, but I was homesick. I don’t think I even could have articulated that at the time because I didn’t even know what I was feeling. 

Fast forward three semesters, I started thinking about transferring back to the Midwest to finish off school. I had been away from home for long enough that my mom and dad’s house didn’t really feel like home to me anymore, but I hadn’t been away for long enough to feel at home in the place I was (let alone trying to make home in a dorm room). 

That’s when I wrote the poem you read earlier. And when I was reminded that my surroundings will only continue to change in life- but my God stays the same. Not only that, but that He actually created me to BE “home.” 

He created me as His dwelling, and for literally no other reason. Beyond that, He’s preparing a place for me so that I can continue to be with Him forever. But that place is here and now. I am home here and now because I AM home here and now. Thanks to the one that lives inside of me. 

And if that’s not love, folks, I’m not sure what is. 

So come in and stay a while, it’s unfinished but I’m learning to get better at letting people in.