What is Home?

Like with most major holidays the days leading up to Easter will be filled with thousands of people traveling home for the happy holiday. I myself was fortunate enough to return to Marin from school in San Diego. This pilgrimage that so many of us make any number of times in a year made me consider what home truly means. For me home is not simply made up of a structure in which I sleep or familiar surroundings of material things. Home is defined by the people who create the environment around us. The beauty of this definition is that home is not simply confined to our familial ties, with this definition home is opened up to include those who we choose to include as our family, as our most special. What's more is that I believe you can find "home" wherever you go. The solace that we typically identify with home can be brought to us by those who are most important to us, and it can be brought to us in any situation or environment, regardless if we are thousands of miles away from our familial "home".
This concept of home brings me to reflecting on what I feel is a much larger theme of lent as a whole: importance.

The time of lent offers us a chance to specifically contemplate aspects of our lives. The pervasive "giving up" of lent in itself often offers people an opportunity to reflect. If we allow ourselves to take full advantage of this lenten period we can welcome Easter with a better understanding of ourselves including what is most important to us. Thanks to Katie Trinter I was recently offered the chance to consider what I would do if I knew it was my last week on Earth. With Easter so close this consideration was very appropriate and challenged me to truly contemplate. For me a final week would not be filled with ostentatious trips or adrenaline pumped "bucket list" items; if I had one week left to spend on Earth I would surround each and every day with those who mean the most to me. The further consideration of who those people would be also became very telling and eye-opening for me. This question of how I would spend my final week has stayed with me for the past few days and while certain activities may change every time I consider it, the feeling of home surrounded by the people I love remains the same. I prompt you to spend some time this holy week considering how you would spend your remaining week on Earth if you knew it would be your last.