The Bell Tower

I was invited to visit the BYU campus in the fall of my senior year at high school for a weekend while BYU tried to “woo” me a bit (I don’t know if it worked or not since I’d decided before hand to go there). We visited with professors and departments and got to experience some classes they put together for us.

There was one point during the weekend when we had some free time and I ended up sitting on the steps below the bell tower. I sat there for a while and just kind of took in the whole feeling of the place. I’d been to BYU many times before when we lived in Utah. But there was something about sitting on those steps at that moment that was different.

As I sat there I felt like I was home. There was no place else I wanted to be.

My mom said when she picked me up at the end of the weekend, which ended with the first football game of the season (which I’d painted my face for, like I did the majority of the ones I went to while I was a student), that she could also tell something was different. Part of me had already moved out of the house and was at BYU.

The whole time I was a student at BYU I liked to pass the bell tower whenever I could. It was always a special place to me, a symbol of my home there.

There are those places in the world and in life where you just feel at home. Places where it seems you just belong, where you are comfortable, where you feel like you’ve always been there. Even people I’ve met have had that feeling for me. The bell tower was just one of those places for me at that time of my life. Since then I’ve certainly felt that at other places as life has taken me where it has. As my life has moved, so has that feeling of home.

Right now, that feeling of home for me is in our home, together.

Where have your homes been? Where have you felt that you’ve come home to?