Four years ago, I was at a concert seeing a band that is still one of my favorites today. Switchfoot’s frontman Jon Foreman announced onstage that the track written for the first Chronicles of Narnia movie was nothing but a lie. Little did I know in that instant that it was to be a watershed moment in my life. It was far more than a notable memory in a great concert.

The name of the song was “Home” and if you haven’t heard it yet, it’s phenomenal. Jon (since I’m claiming him as my friend now) was saying that the idea of home was not what the song was proclaiming. That was interesting as I was just beginning to feel at home in Charlottesville and I did not understand what he meant other than the allusion to Jesus’ quote about not having a place to lay his head.

“And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’” — Matthew 8:20

Friends, I have graduated from college, moved outside of Philadelphia, taken numerous road trips and a few flights in the past year. My life has been anything but sedentary. It is only because of all this that I now begin to understand the true meaning of this statement. As usual, Jesus meant far more than what appears on the surface.

The saying goes, “Home is where the heart is,” but that can’t even be taken at face value. The fact is, our heart is not at all where we imagine it to be. The heart that is spoken of here is in fact our soul. Yes, my heart is in my chest, but my eternal heart, or soul, is not. In fact, my soul is in the higher spiritual realm. Therefore, I cannot expect it to be constantly bogged down with my usual day-to-day transient concerns.

That being said, the question of where our heart truly is remains. I’ve said it’s in a higher place, the spiritual realm. With that in mind, I don’t understand why I try to treat my heart as if it were a physical entity. It is in a sense, but it’s most certainly not one. My heart is eternal and it’s about time I treated it in this way.

I can’t treat my heart as I do my physical one, so I am now left at an impasse. I can either treat it as intendedly eternal or merely as a form of flesh. As I alluded earlier, I cannot treat it as flesh, but this is a problem as I also previously stated. I cannot treat it as flesh and bone, despite the fact that I know it to be very real.

My heart is just as real as the very experiences in my everyday life. With my heart being this real, I cannot believe that home (by any definition) is where this heart resides. Here is the crux of this post.

Home is not on this earth. As much as I enjoy this existence, it is not where my heart or home lies. No, my heart is only found in heaven. Therefore, that is precisely where home is. Do you see? Home truly is where the heart is, but not the one that resides in your chest.

At the risk of overstating my point, home is in heaven where our (for the God-fearing Christians of us) hearts reside. They are far above the trifiling concerns of this temporary existence. This fact is critical to understand as it makes more than a world of difference. Friends, we have been given a heart of love and tenderness replacing the one of stone we once possessed. What we do with this instrument is up to us, but the call is unmistakable. We are called to live life at the level of our hearts, above this earth, so with what will we be consumed today? Will it be the short-lived occupations of the present or the concerns of the Kingdom? That question is to be answered daily.