To travel outside of your home is to share a world outside of your own.

I was fortunate enough to recently take a trip down the California coast.

It was 10 nights, 11 days, Highway 1 with the top down on a Jeep Wrangler, driving one of the most beautiful stretches of land this country has to offer.

I was born in Los Angeles, moved to Texas as baby, and after returning to the homeland in 2006 I fell in love with the beauty of the land, the people, the energy… the sense of something I only found when I was there. Well I found it again on this trip, but it was different and after returning home, that sense of something has taken on a new meaning and has a new light that I did not see before.

While walking the streets of San Francisco, you feel the hills, you see the buildings and people, you hear the sounds of cars, people, and sirens, you taste the bay, and you smell all of those at any given point, but the sense I remember most about this trip was the sixth sense, the sense of place.

When Lindsay died on September 23rd, I had a sense of something changing. That has only increased over time…

My sense of place use to be with my wife, my boys, in our home on a Sunday night snuggled up getting ready for the new week. It was Monday mornings at the office, putting on a fresh pot of joe. It was Saturday nights with our friends, talking about everything we had done that week and everything we plan to do for the next 10 years. It was that Tuesday night making a new memory with the boys.

When I close my eyes, I hear better. When I pinch my nose, I taste better.

Following those days in San Francisco, I paid closer attention to that sense of place. Granted it has only been a couple weeks since I was there, I have had a little time to process my new found sense, the one that has been there all along, but has been taken for granted or overlooked or whatever you want to call it.

To me, at this point in my life, it is the most important.

I have processed a lot over the last nine months…

I have lost my wife, tearing out my heart and making me feel a pain that not even the words you read can describe…

I have eaten a meal made by her before she left me, that tasted sweeter than anything you can imagine…

I have touched every single piece of remembrance that she left behind, which is the most bitter sweet feeling to have something so insignificant give you so much joy…

I have found love again, unexpectedly, giving and taking so much from that past sense of place.

I have wept, I have laughed, I have been scared, I have felt strength, but with all of this, one thing remains…

I am Gabriel Journey Lewis.

I have a God that is gentle, He is right, He never fails, He is always right there in whatever place I am in.

I have always said that my home is where my heart is…

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow my heart is with the Lord, it is with the ones I love.

I am here. I am here. I am here.

My place is inside of me…

It is the sense to know my Lord, my Savior is my home.

My home is right there, it is here, it is that sense of place I will wake up tomorrow and know everything will be ok.

I will feel pain amongst the love I have in my life with every hug, every word of encouragement, every kiss my boys give me to brighten my day, every prayer, every breath, every memory rehashed in photos or with just a quick glance at an item used by my love I had here for a little while.

Every day remember that sense of place and let it guide your life.

It is that sense of place that will get you home.

Go home.

Gabe