What Moly Had to Say about HOME:

My copy of The Wind in the Willows is illustrated by Helen Ward. Here's her rendition of Mole's little home:

Notice the warm fire and the beds in bunks along the parlor walls. Mole has a snug, homey abode. He's missed it since he went off adventuring with Ratty.
Here's another depiction of Mole's parlor. I think I like this one better. The dishes are lined up as they should be, and isn't that a welcoming chair?

 

 Oh anyway -- what was I getting at? Mole says this about having a home, after he and Rat come back to Mole's underground domicile: "He saw clearly how plain and simple -- how narrow, even -- it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence."

There it is. Even Moly knows. Each of us needs a location that anchors our existence. We need home. Children particularly need home. As a friend told me recently, home is wherever she and her husband are together. Children know this about their parents.

Mole and Ratty tidy the neglected house.

What two opinions did Robert Frost express about home, in "The Death of the Hired Man"?
1) "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
2) Home is "something you somehow haven't to deserve."

The little mice come caroling at Mole's home that night.

I long for this anchorage, as Mole calls it. Always have. As I age, I think I realize more and more that my anchorage is elsewhere, a specific physical location on God's New Earth. It's not imaginary; it's entirely physical. The more I see myself as a citizen of God's kingdom, the more my existence is anchored there. And since this Earth here will be remade by God (who made it first anyway) into the New Earth later ... then loving even this fallen planet is a way of loving the new one He'll make. This Earth is the same as the New Earth, just as I now am the same person as the person I'll be for eternity, when God resurrects my body and makes me new.  New and improved!

How did I get all spiritual? I only meant to say that I like Mole's words. He waxed unexpectedly philosophical and wise on the night of his return home.
I would add that Frost is right, even when I think of the New Earth as my home. It is something I don't deserve, and I'm never expected to deserve. And because God has adopted me as His child, when I have nowhere else to go but heaven, He will most certainly have to take me in. He has to because He's promised me, sworn to me on His own character that He'll do it. That's anchorage.