Editor’s note: “Beliefs” is a weekly guest column featuring members of the community sharing their thoughts through the lens of their beliefs.

There was a time when everything I owned could be fit in the back of my Chevy Vega. All my stuff and I would be faithfully ferried to and from home, wherever that home would be: Chicago, Connecticut, Indiana. August comes, reminding me of journeys home as I see old and new cars filled with stuff and faces. I see the histories, expectations and desires crammed into those cars, coming to Ames and Iowa State. Welcome home, welcome to the place where you now have two homes, here and where you have left.

Frederick Buechner writes: “Home is finding a place where you feel that all is somehow ultimately well, even if things aren’t going all that well at any given moment.”

Having our stuff around helps – it’s why we bring it along.

Not only is life a bit easier and more enjoyable, our things remind us of who we are and how we belong. As we put our things in their place, the space is changed. This room, sheltering us from weather and other hostile forces, shelters us in time as well.

The past is never completely gone and the future is at hand – we, of all communities, are most aware of that when we arrive at the university.

Coming home, creating home, at this time and in this space has something to do with our heart’s desires: knowing what we desire – using our brains, aware of our desire’s absence – feeling with our heart, and choosing to pursue it – taking courage. These are components of that which is held, protected, nurtured when we are at home. Welcome home.

We populate home with ourselves. Making a home means actually living there, living amid the ordinary and the extraordinary. We are each “homemakers” creating a sense of permanence amidst the fluidity of time, offering to ourselves and those around us some sense of beauty as we understand it. Starting with a place and stuff, we offer ourselves to the world and protect ourselves from the world – whether it be the people across the hall, or threats from across the world. Welcome home!

With the dust settled and the tears somewhat dried, we began to strike the toll of what had been lost on September 11. We continue to count the loss, approaching the first remembrance. Thousands of lives gone, dreams vanishing on a bright sunny morn. Families broken, living amid the wreckage of grief. Payments, lawsuits, and a war continue to be determined and fought over.

We wrestle with homeland security and its legal ramifications. We seek to right what was wronged, to put things back in their place, to resume. The tragedy of September 11 is the loss of home, the destruction to the many individual homes where death sits as an empty chair in the kitchen. It is also the larger violation of the sheltering land and culture we call home. What, then, can be trusted and how, we ask, when will we be safe? And the perpetrators shall be “eye for an eye!”

Welcome home.

I am a Christian with a Lutheran flavoring. Home finds its locale quite specifically at the foot of a cross. There, intertwined beams holding salvation’s sacrifice, an eternal intersection of time and space, is home. The one suspended there spoke of dwelling: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25). This home gives itself away with its heart set in the realm of God. This is not a dark home filled with the cobwebs of death, for the light of Easter Sunday continues to shine upon the sinner/saint that I am. The hope engendered in this light brings me back to the various dwellings where I have sought home with a renewed energy, with a restored openness. Welcome home!

At Jesus’ cross, the emptiness of September 11 meets our need for the richness of home. At Jesus’ cross redemption is found and our capacity to go home is restored.

In the resurrection hope fills our days and restores our willingness to try again, to dig through the rubble, whether it be in New York City or here in our dorm room or apartment in Ames, to sit with the empty chairs and the filled ones. To find ourselves at home in God’s grace – not something I can create – is to have the capacity to be a life-giver, to bear something of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life. So I return home, weekly, to worship and say “Thank you” to God.

I return home, in the midst of my several homes, to be reminded who I am and to Whom I belong. Amid the trappings of the familiar and the sacred, amid the past and the remarkably opened future, amidst people I know and people I don’t, I rediscover home. Welcome home!

Fritz Wehrenberg

is a campus pastor at University Lutheran Center in Ames.