And after getting into a boat he crossed the sea and came to his own town.

Jesus had been raised in Nazareth but Capernaum had become the place he now called home. It was much larger than Nazareth , certainly more cosmopolitan. And as he discovered early on in his ministry, when he did go back to Nazareth for a visit, he was not so warmly welcomed and his message was rejected almost out of hand. In the long run, then, it proved to be a good move on Jesus’ part to find another community to call home, one more open to his message.

Every one of us wants a place to call home, a place we can go to when our life seems upside down and inside out. It is a place of comfort and solace and security. It may be no one else’s idea of home but that doesn’t matter. We call it home and we feel at home there and that is enough. We do not have to explain why because that why may not be so explainable because to everyone else it is unexplainable.

It has been said that once we leave home, we cannot go back home again. We cannot in the sense that what we left is no longer. As we grow and move on so does what we have left behind. It grows as well. It often grows in a direction we wish it would not. But we have left and when we come back home, it is no longer home – as Jesus discovered when he returned to Nazareth .

Jesus outgrew Nazareth . We can outgrow our hometowns. It happens. That does not make our old hometowns or us any better or any worse. We change. Towns change. Life goes on. When we find we cannot go back home again, we have to find another place we can call home.

I love my hometown because it was the place where I grew up. It helped me become the person I now am, yes, for better or for worse – hopefully, for the better. But I am not sure I can go back there to live again and once again call it my home. Both the town and I have changed and we may no longer be compatible. Some of my siblings still live there and they love it. Too much has changed all around for me to now be able to call it anything but the town in which I was raised.

The truth is, where we are is where our home is, hometowns notwithstanding. We make a home; we settle in; we become part of a community. As long as we remain unsettled, or allow ourselves to remain so, we will keep looking for that place to call home and we will never find a home. Home, as is said, is where the heart is, and we can make any place a place of the heart. To do so we have to allow our hearts to be open to begin to see the goodness and godliness of everyone and everything around us. For all creation is God’s and all creation and all creatures reflect the goodness and love of God. Home can be, should be, wherever we find ourselves at the moment.