I wonder, what do you picture in your mind’s eye when you hear the word home?

I tend to picture something similiar to the photos above. A warm light glowing through the window, worn, cozy sofas, a soft duvet, a big table to fit lots of people around, a well-used kitchen and maybe even the comforting crackling sound and slight smoky smell of an open fire (I think I am really just describing my dream home of a cozy cabin in the woods here). But is that really home? What makes a place home? What (in the words of some teenagers I know) even is home?

I tend to think a lot about this topic of home. Maybe it’s because I live in a nation where just saying “Hello” betrays I wasn’t born here and I am constantly asked the questions “Where’s home?”; “Where are you from?”; “How often do you go back home?”; “Do you miss home?”; “Do you think you’ll ever move back home?”  I’m never allowed to forget that this is not where I’m originally from. Yet when I do return to what people here would consider to be my ‘home’ (the US), I don’t feel ‘at home.’ Much of my language, the words I now use, has changed and I forget it has changed until someone gives me a strange look while I’m speaking to them, or my family/friends make fun of my new way of talking. My perspectives of the world have changed. I no longer associate my faith with being a consertaive Republican and I no longer find any sense of identity in being a die-hard American patriot, which many of my American friends, even my Christian friends, can not understand or relate to. I struggle with parts of American culture now. I still see the good and beautiful and there are things I am even proud of still and I celebrate those things. Yet I see other things in a different light now and I often feel uncomfortable and slightly frustrated while in the nation that most people would call my ‘home.’

Fortunately, I was prepared for this strange place I find myself in, where I am daily reminded that I will never completely ‘fit’ in the nation that is now what I call my ‘home’ and yet I also don’t feel like I ‘fit’ in the nation I was born in. This strange place is called ‘third culture’ and I am grateful to an amazing woman named Lisa Borden for teaching about it out of her own painful personal experiences as a missionary who has lived in various nations and cultures. Understanding this and that there is even a term for what I now experience has been hugely helpful. Yet I have to admit, that even in understanding it, it is still a very lonely place, and at times bewildering. And it really causes you to redefine your concept of home.

For many of us, because where we are from is what we would consider home, our identity is still connected, at least in part, to that place. When your sense of home begins to shift, your sense of identity can feel shaken slightly. Some of us respond to this by holding even tighter to what we think makes us who we are, yet much of that tied is to the place we are from originally and is not actually who we are at our very core. The holding so tightly to these things will only isolate us more, discontent and frustrate us and cause us to feel contstantly in conflict, if not with all around us, then within ourselves. We can also take on an attitude of superiority, that our ways of doing and thinking are better than those of this new culture and environment. Which again, will leave you isolated and frustrated. Others of us try to surivive in our new environment by attempting to completely cast off all that would connect us with our old home. Which can never be done fully, not without a part of who you are dying or being painfully suppressed. And making the return to the old environment incredibly painful and difficult.

But there is a third option and that is the place we call ‘third culture’ where you within yourself embrace the best of both cultures, letting go of what is harmful, unhelpful, or just not needed. You learn who you really are outside of your cultural upbringing and influences and you begin to live out of who you are at your core. It is a difficult, painful, lonely and often misunderstood place but it is the palce where you can live with the greatest peace and confidence within yourself and can invest the best of yourself and all you have to offer in both the old and new cultures.

But I digress. Back to home. I think we would all define home as being the place  where we can be “ouselves,” where we can “let our hair down,” where we are understood. What happens to our sense of home when there is no longer a geographical location that feels like home as described above?

Everyone’s story is different so my experience will not be like others’.  As a child, I had a deep longing ache that could only be described as homesickness for the Celtic nations when I had never even stepped foot out of the US. This longing only deepend and intesified over the years and once in ministry, I recognised the call of God in it. In 2004 & 2005, two things happened that laid the foundation for my journey in understanding home. In 2004, I was handed the book Red Moon Rising by Pete Greig that no only confirmed what I felt called to, where I felt called to make my ‘home,’  but also who I felt called to make my home amongst, the family, the tribe that I connected with at a deep level. It also introduced me to The Vision poem, which is part of the second thing in 2005. I had a done a short school with YWAM on the West Coast of Scotland and when it came time to return to Texas, I was in turmoil. The years of homesickness and aching longing had been at rest while in Scotland and now that it came time to leave, my heart felt physically torn. I had a sense I would be back, I even had some vision, but God wasn’t giving me any guarantees. As is typical in our relationship, He was only showing me that moment’s step. I cried out to Him about not feeling like I really belonged anywhere and immediately He spoke into my heart the bit from The Vision:

“They are mobile like the wind, they belong to the nations. They need no passport. People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence.’  

This has become my life motto in a way, it gives me strength when I grow weary of the constant rootlessness.

Now I live in Scotland. And I would call it home. They say “home is where your heart is” and my heart is definitely in Scotland. When I am at a conference and asked where I’m from I say Scotland, though there is invariably the following question of where I’m from originally. The sense of homesickness is gone because I am where that ache was calling me to. But do I feel ‘at home’ in the sense talked about earlier? No. I have often thought, if I just didn’t live with others but had my own place where I could decorate in my style, etc I would finally feel ‘at home.’ I had that for a year. Nope. I know now that having my own house will not give me a sense of ‘home.’ Do I want my own house where I can decorate in my own style, open wide my doors to share hospitality with others? Yes, most definitely. I ache for it. But if I don’t ever get it I know I’ll be okay. Because it wouldn’t really be home. Not for me. I have come to accept that there is no physical place that can provide me with the home my soul longs for. The closest I ever feel to what I’m longing for in a physical place is when I’m out in nature – walking on the beach, up a hill, on a mountain, or through a wooded path.

I have come to realise that my only sense of home is to be found in one person – the person of the Trinity. It is with Him that I most feel ‘at home,’ for it He who understands me like no other ever will or can even. And the beauty of this is that I am never without home. Last week while on holiday, Holy Spirit whispered into my heart ‘I AM with you’ and I knew He meant not just in ministry, in my role, in serving Him, in implementing vision, but in the every day; in each moment, in my waking and my sleeping, in my eating and my walking, in my resting and reading, in watching telly and chatting with friends, in creating and writing… in every aspect of life. I would love to come home in the evenings to a husband who is both best friend and partner, to a home that is simple yet warm and cosy and looks like me. But that life may not be for me. And that is okay. Because my sense of identity is not tied to where I live, but to Jesus and all that He created me to be. And because my true home is found in the One who ensures that I am never without home and that my home is eternal.

“All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost…” J.R.R. Tolkien