My dad used to love Winnie the Pooh. He loved the line from the Pooh’s Grand Adventure movie that goes: “You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

And to this day, whenever I see Winnie the Pooh quotes or graphics floating around on the internet, I can’t help but think of him. It’ll always be this way I think. 

My favorite quote is also from the same movie my dad’s favorite is from. It’s an exchange that happens between Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin at the beginning of the film.

“You are just in time for the best part of the day!” Pooh exclaims.

Christopher Robin asks, “What part is that?” 

“The part when you and me, become we,” says Pooh. 

I don’t know why, but thoughts like these take me back to a simpler time and make me think of my idea of home. 

What does home mean to you?

To me, it means summers in Florida. I think of intense heat, running around the neighborhood as a child with the other kids and maybe deeming to drink from the hose, as if there wasn’t fresh filtered water inside the house a dozen and a half steps away. I think of how the region does its best impression of winter during the last two months of the year or so, and we all love it for that (think palm trees dressed in Christmas lights and slow breezes that suddenly become a rush out of nowhere, especially when you’re near a body of water, or think the crispy cool air that always seems to accompany shopping for a Christmas tree).

When I think of home, where I grew up comes to mind. But as pleasant as this can be, I can’t help but long for something more, something greater, a better country.

Is it like that for you? 

CS Lewis puts it this way: 

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.” (The Weight of Glory)

I think what CS Lewis is saying here and elsewhere in his writing is that there exists a deep longing inside all of us for an experience we can taste in this world, but will only fully grasp in the next. Until then, this longing is piqued by the best of life’s experiences that always seems to escape our grasp. And yet, we can’t help but grab for them.

It makes me think about what home really means then, and perhaps I’d adjust my definition. The answer to the true meaning of it is found in God’s Word. 

I was just reading in Genesis 28 about a place Jacob called the “house of God” where he saw the stairway to heaven. It means the place where God dwells. And then you have King David’s longing for God’s house in the psalms, and how he always sought the Lord’s presence. 

And there’s so much on this subject, way too much to write about in a single blog, but the point to me is that God finds His dwelling place with humankind.

In the Old Testament, His presence dwelled in the temple, and in the New, He quite literally came to earth and dwelled here. 

And now, the Bible says His presence dwells inside us as believers—that we are His temple. 

It seems to me that God’s definition of home, then, always seems to include us in it. And vice versa: if it’s Him that we’re always longing for deep down, what does that say about where we belong?

So whether on earth or in heaven, I hope you find your home with Him.

How to begin, you say? 

I think Pooh has already given us the secret—it starts with the best part of the day, the part where you and Him, become we. :)

“Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?” 
- 1 Corinthians 3:16