Home Really Is Where the Heart Is
on homesickness, feeling like strangers, and the treasure we carry
As our group walked down White Street (our town’s main street) today, stopping to listen to stories our local historical museum’s docent was sharing about the old buildings we were passing and what they used to be, we came upon Shorty’s Hot Dogs. The façade of the old brick building touted a historical marker sign stating 1916 as the year Shorty’s opened, along with a brief history, including the same family that opened the restaurant back then owns and operates it today. While the docent kept speaking, I stepped under Shorty’s awning to share the shade with a few other members of our group. I sized up the group, knowing many were locals, as Shorty’s patrons, or at least having already visited the famous stop. I hadn’t, but had been curious about it. So, I turned around and placed my hands on the glass around my eyes to see in. I saw the leather bar stools and counter, reminiscent of a 1950’s counter service restaurant, along with the leather booths, and all the signs on the walls looked antique. A group, including a little girl who looked to be about 4 or 5, was having lunch. As I scanned a few more of the nostalgic details inside, I decided we’d have to stop by again to show the kids later. Restaurants don’t look like this anymore; you’d have to go to museums to see this kind of nostalgia. This place was stuck back in time.
Our group continued and while the docent was sharing the history of a mural on the side of one of the buildings, a child’s voice distracted me and I turned around to see the little girl I had spotted inside Shorty’s. She was skipping in front of the restaurant, being followed by her white-haired grandmother and another older woman. The girl had an old school bottle of Coca-Cola in her hand and she yelled something out to her “Papaw”. A white-haired gentleman was walking up the sidewalk to meet her and the women. He was laughing as his granddaughter skipped up to him and he gave her a great, big grandpa hug. I smiled watching how she held the bottle of soda out from their embrace, being careful not to spill a drop.
A complicated wave of emotion came over me and I tried to explain it briefly in a whisper to my husband, so as not to distract the docent still talking. But he didn’t understand because I wasn’t articulating it well.
The emotion was something like a swirl of nostalgia of childhood innocence and safety in love, a feeling of home and of hometown, mixed with feeling like a stranger, a foreigner in my own town. That little family’s lunch inside the stuck-in-time restaurant is likely an experience that’s been on repeat, for the grandparents, possibly at least for decades. I bet the man behind the lunch counter knows their names. I bet he smiled when they walked in and he may have even known how the little girl liked her hot dog. Ketchup and relish only. I bet the man opened the ‘pop’ with a manual old-timey bottle opener and the bottle cap flipped onto the counter with a couple clinks and she scooped it up, like a treasure, and secured it in her pocket, knowing she’d take it home soon and put it with her other treasures. And yet, here I was, passing through, taking a tour. I was a tourist in my own town learning about the town she was living in. Yes, I live here now, too, but nobody knows my name. My Mamaw and Papaw have been gone for decades. I don’t drink Coca-Cola, anymore. Are you kidding me? The amount of sugar. And I’m sure Shorty’s doesn’t have gluten-free hot dog buns—if I ever decided to splurge and want a hot dog or two from this legendary lunch spot.
I felt like a stranger, an out-of-towner, watching this all unfold in front of me like a Hallmark movie. The Norman Rockwell quality of the entire experience felt surreal - comforting, yet uncomfortable. I had been that girl. Lunches out with my Mamaw and Papaw, drinking the soda I normally didn’t get to drink, and eating anything I wanted, skipping and being embraced, pocketing treasures to take home. Being known.
That little girl was probably 4 or 5 and I wondered how long it might be before she feels like a stranger wherever her feet land her. Before she walks through towns and feels unknown. Before she loses the comforts of home – the mamaws and the papaws and embraces from family and skips on the sidewalk during the day and the bottles of soda pop and treasured bottle caps in her pocket.
I wondered about the town where I grew up and when I’d exit the Cracker Barrel on Sundays, feeling happy and full and skipping around, surrounded by my Mamaw and Papaw and the rest of my family after we’d all sat together in the long pew at church. I wondered if a woman may have walked past me and had the same pangs of nostalgia and homesickness. But maybe she was already home. Like I was today.
Are we all homesick, even when we are home?
I’m reminded of a quote by C.S. Lewis that often visits the forefront of my mind,
“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
Are we all waiting to go home, to that place where we will be fully known, fully seen? Are we just strangers here, until that day comes?
“So let us go out to him beyond the city walls (that is, outside the interests of this world, being willing to be despised) to suffer with him there, bearing his shame. For this world is not our home; we are looking forward to our everlasting home in heaven.” - Hebrews 13:13-14
A lyric in one of my favorite secular love songs comes to mind: “Home… is where I want to be but I guess I’m already there.”1
Yes, we are waiting for heaven. We are waiting to go home. There are many days when I long for heaven but home is also with us. Home is within us. And as followers of Christ, we carry a treasure that’s been entrusted to us2 in our hearts. We don’t need to wait until we get home to put our treasures safely away in our shell-covered trinket or wood cigar boxes from childhood. Home really is where the heart is.
We may be strangers in this world, but we are not strangers there. We are already known. We are already seen. And, I can guarantee you that someone already knows exactly how we like our hot dogs. All beef with a slight char, on a buttered and toasted gluten-free bun, with mustard, chili, and sweet relish.
“Because the God who said, Out of darkness light shall shine, is the One who shined in our hearts to illuminate the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God and not out of us.” - 2 Corinthians 4:6-7
Talking Heads, ‘This Must Be the Place’
“Guard, through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, the treasure which has been entrusted to you.” - 2 Timothy 1:14