I’ve never really struggled with this idea of homesickness. I couldn’t really tell you what it feels like or if what I have could be called “home sick.” With the holiday season in full swing (or at the tail end of it) and the looming financial deadline: home has been the focus of many of my team’s thoughts and conversations.
I have this sudden desire to return home without knowing what home is for me anymore.
I miss my family, they’re a good bunch. But…
What does home really mean? And what does “home” look like?
So many things have changed, including me.
I’ve had 5 different countries become home for me and within those countries I have referred to 10 different places as home. The place we return to at the end of the day whether that is hostel, tent, African home, orphanage, mission complex, lecture hall floor, or children’s home. Home is now a vague term I toss around.
Home for me has been a place where “solitude” can be found. The place I laid my head down at night. Here the place we do daily feedback. The place I eat, invest my time, the people I cry in front of, among many other things, but mainly home is/has been a place of rest.
The old cliché: home is where the heart is just doesn’t work for me anymore. It’s in the Philippines, Africa, in multiple America states, and my brother’s in Italy (so it’s there to).
What I remember of “home” I don’t what to return there.
So this sudden desire to return home: I don’t know what that means.
This feeling is very odd to me. Especially since I am in love with where I am and the things I’m doing.
I remember Pastor Larry’s sermon growing up about living in this place that is not our home -something about being citizen’s of heaven. How we are traveling nomads living as alien/immigrant in a foreign land. And in this foreign land that is not heaven I see how adulteress and flippant we have become placing anything and everything before God. I walked around a Buddhist Temple today. I was saddened by the lines we had to wait in just to get in, the merchants that could be seen both in and outside, and how we have made idol worship a tourist attraction. It’s rather sickening that I paid to be there. The only redeeming quality of the day was I sang worship songs under my breathe as I walked around it (Jericho fell that way…it was worth a shot).
I’ve been reading Galatians a lot and at the end of it Paul talks about freedom in Christ, living in the Spirit, and how the interests of the world have fallen away from him. My interests are very much of this world and generally based in worry. I feel like all of what Paul talks about in Galatians, about living in the spirit and freedom in Christ, I haven’t attained – that I’m not there yet. But I am there and I have “attained” it. I’m learning to recognize it, claim it, and to walk in confident freedom I have received from the Savior of the World. His grace is sufficient….
Labels are dangerous but call me a nomad, a foreigner in a strange land, a friend, a freed servant.
For now home is with these children in Thailand with homesick for who knows what. For however long I remain here God pour me out and fill me up.
