Where’s home

Sometimes when I’m in the USA, people ask where I am at home, or more at home. Am I at home in the US where I grew up? Or have I become at home in Africa?

I have definitely kept my American identity. Whenever I leave US to go back to Africa, leaving doesn’t feel good. And when I arrive back in Africa, it feels right and good. When I leave Africa to go back to the US, leaving doesn’t feel good. When I then arrive back in the US, it feels right and good. It’s not like one place feels right or good and the other wrong or bad or uncomfortable. No, they both feel equally good, right, and comfortable when arriving and the reverse when leaving.

I dislike leaving both places and like going back to both. So where is home for me? Well, it’s complicated.

7 thoughts on “Where’s home”

I remember one of our little MKs back in the 1980s asking her mother as they traveled, “Where is our home now, Mommy?” It must have been confusing for this little one.

LikeLike

Ed Lauber | May 13, 2017 at 4:19 pm

Wow. Great question!

LikeLike

Home is no longer here for you. You have crossed the bridge to eternal values, where home is where you are with those you love. Having then, those you love here and there, and everywhere, home is where your heart is. Until we all get HOME to heaven, it is complicated, and contradictory. I am living and longing for some place greater and Someone greater.
So now only heaven will satisfy.

LikeLike

Ed Lauber | May 13, 2017 at 4:19 pm

I like that!

LikeLike

When we were in Orientation for Overseas Missionary Fellowship, I remember Denis Lane telling us that eventually we would become “Internationals”; our accent would become undiscernable because we would be a mixture based on the languages we’d learned and heard; our home wouldn’t be in our “homeland” any more; there would be changes.

So you’re just in the midst of those changes, but it’s not a bad thing. How nice to have “home” be wherever you are. Doesn’t Jesus say that He will repay you for the things you’ve lost because you served Him? I think part of that is the gift of friends/home wherever you go. But I do agree with the comment by James, as well!

LikeLike