She once told me that the best word in the entire English-speaking world was "home." There's something about "home." It connects well with its companion, "hearth" to emit that warm feeling.

When a person has a home, he has a place like no other. As Dorothy said, "There's no place like home." She may not have been the first person to say it, when she said it, she spoke for one and all. It's not simply the tag line in a movie that moved Depression audiences to joy, it's a profound statement. There is NO place like home.

Home is the only place in your life where you're welcomed for what you are, not what you produce. No matter how much a person may love his work, the people at work measure you by quotas and stats, by calls made, sales made, or paper forms generated. Work is a treadmill that can't stop and there are no laurels on which to rest. "What have you produced for me today?" the office asks. At work, the seventy-year-old may find that he's outlived his usefulness.

But not home. At home, nobody says, "Make yourself at home" because home is where you're always accepted. The workplace can be a hostile and unforgiving place. But not home. At home our failings are forgiven. Whatever your failings, you can always go home (Luke 15).

It's interesting that we often couple the word "church" with the word "home." We ask people, "Do you have a church home?" Or we refer to County Line Church as our "home church." It's a good coupling because at church people love you because they know your Father; they don't love you because of what you produce. At church people accept you because they know your Father, not because of what you bring to the table. It's impossible to outlive your value at church. At church, there's a valued place for the octogenarian and the tiny one in the crib. That's because they're home.

We're out in the world during the week and we have two words for that world: it can be both "cold" and "cruel." What a wonderful thing it is that on Sunday and on Wednesday we can come HOME.

Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor