What’s home??

For a missionary, “home” is a complicated concept. You were born in a certain place, and have probably moved several times both in your home country and abroad. Wherever you go, you start over again. And while you often think that the important people will stay even if you leave, the reality is often that they drift away anyway. Your world has changed so much that you no longer cross paths automatically.

To start a conversation about this at the Aufatmen retreat, we asked the women to place 3 pins on the world map:
1. Where you come from
2. Where you live/work now
3. Where you feel at home

(Click on the image to enlarge.)

A few things stood out: The pins at the bottom in the ocean above Antarctica. These belong to missionaries who no longer feel completely at home anywhere, because they have started over so many times. For them, feeling ‘at home’ is no longer tied to a place, but to people. Spouse and family have become ‘home’.

For others who worked in a certain place for decades and have now returned to their ‘home’ country, it was striking that they placed their ‘feeling at home’ pin in their field of service, even though they were now living ‘at home’ again. After living in a different culture for so many years, returning is not easy. You have changed, and ‘home’ has changed too.
Someone shared that she no longer understood the people around her, because where she lives now, the language is so different from what she is used to. On top of that, she is not understood by the people around her. Unless you have lived and worked abroad yourself for more than a year, it is very difficult to understand what someone goes through. Your entire mindset has changed. You are used to different customs. Normal is no longer normal. Normal is something you are taught, at home and in the culture where you grew up. As a result, your thinking changes and expands enormously. You start looking differently at people, at cultures, at habits, at traditions. And wherever you have been, you bring back the most beautiful parts.

And there you sit. With your own unique blend of cultures that are so valuable to you, surrounded by people who do not (can not) understand and do not (can not) see it.

In the retreat, with women who have wrestled with these same questions—and still do, who also don’t have all the answers—there is an incredible amount of recognition. And suddenly you don’t have to explain why you feel this way. Everyone recognizes it. Everyone knows it.
What a relief—I’m not crazy.