Deep within all of us is a desire for a home. We all have feelings of not belonging, and a home comforts those feelings. A home is secure, it is permanent. But what happens when it is not permanent? What if you are in a place and you feel like you don't belong there, or anywhere?
Nine years ago, my family and I left our native country to come to the U.S.
It was devastating to leave everything I knew behind and come to strange place where I did not know anything.
I thought assimilation would make this place my new home. Blending in, immersing myself in the culture, learning the language and mimicking behaviors would guarantee a new home for me here, in this new strange place. It didn't quite work out that way. I still felt like a stranger here, I did not have the friends and family that I had in my old country. The food was strange, I missed my grandmother's foods. I had an accent. I did not know of the cartoon shows everyone grew up watching. I felt left out when they would all walk down the memory lane of their childhood and discuss cartoon shows they used to enjoy. My childhood was somewhere else. Truly I thought that my home was back home, not here. Here, I was a stranger and a foreigner.
In 2009, I made a trip back to my country and discovered something devastating. Everything had changed about my home, and I was not there to witness the change, and change along with it. Everything was different. Everything was strange. I felt like I had fallen asleep for many years and had just woken up. I was naive to think that everything would remain the same, though. Nothing is permanent, everything and everyone can change. Needless to say, when arriving "home" I felt the same as I did when I first came to the U.S., I felt out of place. My language skills had deteriorated, and people made fun of me and corrected me. There were new slang terms that had developed while I was gone, I had to learn them. Everyone was so grown up, people were married, studying in universities. The last image I had of them was them being skinny little children, running around barefoot, going down the cliffs to get to the lake to go for a swim. Now they wore shoes and walked like adults. Man oh man, how they had changed. I had changed too. I had become paler and fatter.
I felt out of place in the place I had considered my home. So where was my home then? Not there and not in the U.S., surely not anywhere else in the world either. I was a foreigner to this planet. A wanderer without a home. I feel out of my place even in my house. What if a tree falls on it tonight and destroys it? I don't think I will feel homeless then, I feel homeless now.
This experience in life has made me realize something important. My body is temporary, it is not permanent. This planet is also temporary. This planet is a temporary dwelling place for us to build a life. A life of either seeking the desires and pleasures of this world, or seeking the Lord. The reason why I got so comfortable living on this planet, and actually designated a place on it to call my "home," was because I was seeking worldly pleasures and desires. That is what my life was consumed with.
But now I am a Christian, I have surrendered my life to the Lord and my home is in heaven. My body will die and this planet will parish. My heaven will not, and my soul is eternal, for it has been given to me by the eternal breath of God. Just as my body is a temporary dwelling place for my soul, so is this planet a temporary home. I must fix my attention upon building a home for me in heaven and filling it with riches. The way to do that is to live a righteous life here on earth, and to serve and love the Lord. How I long to go home, to the house of my Lord. He has prepared a place for me there. It is up to me whether or not I shall end up there.
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