When I first left TN for Impact, I was positive for homesickness. Desperately so. I longed for my family, for the familiar places, even for the grocery stores I knew. I wanted to go home.
Yet the longer I stayed in Pine Mountain, the more I started to refer to this place as “home.” The dorms were home. Campus was home. Pine Mountain was home. Even while I was in TN for Fall and Thanksgiving break, I referred to GA as home.
And as I started looking outside of TN for colleges, both far away and even overseas, I realized more and more how my home was not where family was, where friends and familiarity was. Home was where God had put me to be at the time. Even in Brazil, for the few days where we stayed in different places, we called them “home.” Or the camp team Floripa stayed at, it was home for us.
How quick we are to settle into a place when God has placed us there.
So now, as I apply to a college in Eastern Europe, I find myself once again having to look other places to be home. TN isn’t home anymore. My family is there, my friends are there, but that’s not where God has placed me. He has carefully trimmed down the ties that hold me in any given place, so that my home may be found in Him. So that my dependency and safety would be in Him alone. Not in people, places, familiarity. But Him.
And I have to wonder how often we fight this. How often we stubbornly stay in one place, determined to have our way, like a small child throwing a tantrum. We don’t like change. Yet when have our lives as Christians ever been guaranteed stability?
I believe God places us in different places for a reason. He has a plan. And if that means I’ll be a gypsy child for the rest of my life, finding “home” to be where He has placed me, then why worry? My home is found in Him, He is the constant. And He is all I need.
And ultimately, this is not my home! Not even here, not even in the now where He has placed me. If my home is in Him, where does He reside? In my heart? Yes. Omnipotent? Yes. But He settles Himself in His kingdom. And all this homesickness I feel, all this longing for a place to be truly “home”…is not because I’m not home?
My home is in His kingdom, it’s not here.
“Feeling like a refugee
Like it don’t belong to me…
…But I’m not sentimental
This skin and bones is a rental
And no one makes it out alive…
Until I die I’ll sing these songs
On the shores of Babylon
Still looking for a home
In a world where I belong…”
-Switchfoot, Where I belong
by: Janae Leek, Class of 2012