A few years ago someone compiled a list of “the worst cities and towns in the United States.” After considering several health and safety and economic factors, he determined that the very worst city on the list was Steubenville, Ohio.
Now I have never been to Steubenville, but I can understand what happened next. The good people of the town were outraged! Very quickly and enthusiastically they began to tell everyone about their great history, the educational opportunities, the beautiful landmarks, the nice restaurants, and the famous people who came from Steubenville. I was surprised to learn that Steubenville was the hometown of some really fine talent, such as baseball pitcher Rollie Fingers and entertainer Dean Martin. Roy Rogers and Clark Gable came from towns just down the road from there. It is the home of Franciscan University. People in Steubenville, Ohio think that it is the best place in the world to live. They told the man who wrote the article that if he didn’t like it, Delta was ready when he was.
Whoever you are and wherever you live, it is likely that you have a lot of pride in your hometown, your school, your football team, and other things associated with “home”. That is not bad- it is good! We are who we are, largely because of where we came from.
We are bound together with the land and the faces and the places where we have lived our lives. My wife remembers that even when times were hard, she enjoyed the sights and scents of the orange groves and the mango trees, the grapefruits and the avocadoes of South Florida. She will never get the sand out of her shoes. Anything below sixty degrees is so cold she says she is “freezing”!
On the other hand, I was raised in a working-class family in Birmingham, where my father worked in the steel mills for over forty years. The smell of soot and coal dust and molten metal, believe it or not, is very pleasant to me! As I grew up, we ate well as long as the blast furnaces were putting that beautiful smoke into the air! We lived on a steep hill overlooking one of the huge furnaces in the distance, and from our front porch we could always see the fire as it burned day and night. When I was a very small boy I once visited my cousins in Atlanta, and my first question when I got to their front porch was, “Where’s your fire?” I thought everybody was supposed to have an iron-melting furnace to look at!
“Home”, whether the big city or the small town or the country community, was the place where we laughed and we cried, we worked and we played, we loved and we fought, we broke up and we made up. Home is where we first heard Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, Elvis and Buddy Holly, Marty Robbins or Simon and Garfunkel, Fleetwood Mac or Pink Floyd. Home is where we buried our sweet old bird dog, where we walked the aisle in a summer revival, and where we hung out until midnight at the Dairy Queen. Home is the place where we fell in love “forever”, and it actually lasted for three months.
Home is a special place, not because of beautiful scenery and famous celebrities, but because it is the place where we developed relationships with the ones who lived there. It is a great place, not because of the standard of living or the cultural opportunities, but because its soil contains our blood and sweat and tears. It is unique and different and better than all other places because it is a part of us and we are a part of it. We poured our lives into just trying to survive there, and the very struggle of it all helped us to bond to the people and the places, the dirt and the concrete, the smells and the sights and the sounds of “home”.
Recently I drove back through what was left of the old Birmingham neighborhood. Our old house still stands as a shabby shack. The blast furnaces are abandoned, and the fire went out a long time ago. The school I attended is a run down empty shell. A freeway now covers the park where we played baseball. It’s sad to see that things have changed, when the way they were is so much a part of who we are.
The ghosts of the past, the remembrance of special people and special times and special places, are never really far from our thoughts. We can cherish the memories, but we cannot go back to a place that no longer exists. Not only have those places changed, but we have changed, too. Let us find joy in living the life that is given to us now.
But somewhere deep inside all of us there is a longing for a place that is really “home” – a place where there is love and peace, laughter and joy, satisfaction and fulfillment. We dream of a place where the bad people will be good and the good people will be humble! We hear the faint echo of perfect music. We catch a fleeing glimpse of incredible beauty. We yearn for more…. much more.
I am persuaded that the same One who placed this longing within us has also prepared such a place for us, somewhere. I don’t know how far it is from Steubenville. I think it may be a little closer to Birmingham! Such a place, wherever it is, is not very far from any of us who long for it.
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