For me this year... airport terminals and highway gas stations! After being practically a nomad for the past 4 years, I feel "at home" immediately - anywhere I've stayed for 2 days or so. Partly because of the warm hospitality of my awesome family and friends old and new from Mississippi to Tokyo. But I realized this fall that while my optimistic brain likes to say "I feel at home everywhere", the honest answer is that nowhere has been my home in so long (8 years?), I'm not sure I remember what "home" feels like.
People encourage and even praise expats for valuing and longing for our "true Home" - our heavenly one - and I see where they're coming from (like Hebrews 11:13~16). I hear missionaries saying it to each other all the time! I'm growing in understanding it, deeply, but most days I don't feel like being praised for my sacrifice and faith. Because I'm human, and I'm homesick for a good ol' earthly home, too; in the heart of Tokyo, if you please.
And also because I don't want to minimize the beautiful other side: people who do know, for decades or even a century, the rich feeling of "home" in one location. Surely the experience of home can give an all-the-deeper appreciation and longing for our one-day heavenly home that will outshine any earthly one! (Not that I'm speaking from experience, but...right?)
So if you see me or a fellow expat/missionary/nomad and are inspired by how, like Christ, we have "no place to lay our heads" but look forward instead to our heavenly home, praise the Lord. But please don't praise us! In turn, know that you give us a refreshing little taste of that future Home as you share your earthly one with us through conversation, prayer, meals, warm beds, every-day worship... and we're praising God for it and for you!
Now a little fun for those who had the endurance to make it through my ramblings ;) Pictures of what "home" looks like for some in Tokyo:
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| Efficient (Yes, this is the whole thing) |
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| Luxury (Yeah...this one might be out of my price range...) |
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| "Home" from the outside (my dear neighborhood 2012~2014) |
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| Last but not least, my dream floor-plan (or close enough to it)! |
