Home Is Where He Is

 I just hit my nine year “landiversary” of living overseas. For eight years and ten months I was given permission to live there but two months ago my residence application was denied. In an effort to find another way to stay, I overstayed my permission by a week and upon exiting I received a 90 day entry ban as a punishment. 

This is on the heels of a year FULL of travel and the last several months being FULL of transition and displacement. I did some quick calculations and found that I stayed in a place other than my own home 46% of 2023 and I slept in roughly 30 different places. Someone recently described my life like being bounced around like a ping pong ball all over the place. It’s an accurate description.

And where am I now? I’m currently living with my parents trying to apply for a different visa to return to my host country. My sister and her family are also staying with my parents. Never in my wildest dreams did I think we would be living under the same roof again. I haven’t lived with my sister since the summer of 2001. I mention that to say my parents’ house is full. I’m sharing the play room/napping room with my two year old niece. 

This week I’m visiting some friends in another city and I just basically zipped up my suitcase to come. I don’t have space to unpack my clothes at my parents’ house and rather than picking and choosing what clothes to bring, I just brought them all. I’ve decided to think of my suitcase as a portable closet. It feels like a funner way to view the situation.

I spy a niece in my portable closet

The pattern of 2023 is continuing even now into 2024. I’m essentially home-LESS but I do have a place to lay my head. I’ve complained A LOT lately to the Lord about how unsettled I feel. A LOT. A lot. I have no idea when I will actually feel settled again. I’ve complained about feeling like a ping pong ball bounced all over the place. And yet the Spirit has had this refrain on repeat…

“Foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head.”

My Shepherd gently chides me in my complaints. “I know child, what it is to be without a home. You’re not alone in this.”

Then in an advent devotion by Hannah Anderson I read the following:

“We must acknowledge that those of us who enjoy warm homes and safe environments are the minority. We must realize that the call of Christ sometimes means leaving houses and lands just as he did. And we must accept that loving a world where there is “no room” will not necessarily lead to domestic tranquility.”

“As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.””

Luke 9:57-58 

Again with the verse. He purposefully placed himself in a vulnerable environment beneath even the animal world. Am I better than he? As his follower do I want to side step the discomfort and suffering he experienced? Will following him not mean that I experience much of what he experienced? 

A home is not promised to me

 

- it wasn’t to Jesus either. 

Our call is to leave houses and lands as he did. At one point it meant leaving America for me, at this point for me it means leaving my host country for a bit.

There is a worship song in my host country. One of the lines says,

“Dünya elinde olan bizde konut kuruyor” and it means:

The One who holds the world in his hands makes his home with us. 

What I have been promised is that He will make His home in me. THAT is what I have been promised.

'We do not need to cling to houses and lands because our home is with him.”

We will gain a hundred times more what we have left. We seek a better home, an eternal one. 

Home is where He is.

A painting inspired by this post