(RNS) When I was a child I lived in a small logging town in Southern Oregon. Bly had one paved road and the short walk down my dirt street ended in the woods. I remember a deer entering a clearing while I was sitting on a log next to my dad as he read. On occasion wild horses would stampede through town.

When I was 5 we moved to Southern California, but I never forgot the wonder and wildness of the first place I called home.

When I first visited the San Juan Islands back in 1981, I remember feeling a deep inexplicable connection. Two years ago we moved to Orcas Island where we live on seven acres of wooded forest. Our house sits on a bluff, overlooking the waters of Eastsound. It is the first time since childhood I have felt completely at home.

The desire for home is a powerful human instinct. The Beatles sang wistfully, “Once there was a way to get back homeward.” On the “Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” soundtrack, Switchfoot sings of being created for a place they’ve never known, a home where they belong. Robert Frost famously said, “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

I was explaining my feelings about home to some friends in Seattle recently and when I got up early the next morning to catch the ferry to Orcas, my friends had put on my briefcase a Somerset Maugham quotation.

I didn’t think much about it until 90 minutes later, when I pulled onto the ferry and headed upstairs for coffee. I saw an acquaintance and waved to her, only to realize as I approached her car that she was sobbing. I did what any man would do in such a time as this, I averted me eyes and started to head upstairs, but she rolled down her window and called out my name.

I asked, “Are you OK?”

She said, “We’ve moved three times in the past two years and now own two homes in places where I don’t really have any friends. I feel like I don’t have a home and I don’t know what to do about it.”

I reached in my pocket and handed her the Somerset Maugham quote:

“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers at their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.”

Her reading of this resulted in fresh tears, but less hopeless ones, because she felt understood and not nearly so alone.

I’ve come to see that our universal longing for home is rooted in a collective human memory of our ancestral home in the ancient Garden of Eden. Joni Mitchell, in her song “Woodstock,” said it best: “We are stardust/billion year old carbon/We are golden …/And we’ve got to get ourselves/back to the garden.”

The ancient Hebrew word shalom, which is generally translated in English as peace, actually refers less to the cessation of war than to wholeness and wellbeing. In that mythic garden described in the ancient biblical tale, humans experienced oneness with God, each other and the earth itself. We were at home.

Our longing for home is a longing for God, because for humans, home is where God is. As C.S. Lewis said, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)