My friend and I were walking in a city not our own- not by heritage, legacy or law. We’d known the city long enough not to be lost, exactly... but not so well that we didn’t occasionally lose our bearings, or mistake one unfamiliar street for another. We’d known each other for even less time. We were new friends, but there was something shared between our spirits that seemed to supersede any brevity of acquaintance. We walked and talked, falling easily into each other’s somehow familiar stride.

She said, “You know, lately, when I talk about the future; where to work and where to move next, I’ve been hearing myself say, “I want to go Home.”

I knew the feeling. I’d been living as a foreigner half a world from my place of birth. Though I’d found much to love, and planted pieces of my heart where I was, I was weary. I wanted to go home too.

But where was that?

She and I were both wanderers... dandelion children... plunging roots into the earth and shooting up in bursts of color, only to take to the skies again, and fall again where the wind ordained.

I scanned my memory, going through the list of all the cities and countries I knew my friend to have loved and left. I wondered which of these was calling her back.

And I asked her, “Where is home?”

But she gave an answer that surprised me, replying with careful, decisive words.

“It’s a place I haven’t been yet.”

Can that be possible? Can we have lived whole lives, of here, there, and everywhere, without ever finding “home”?

What is home, anyway?

I recently surveyed my friends, those both rooted and far-flung, to describe the place for me. According to them, Home is where you find comfort, safety, belonging and rest. Home is familiar. Home is where love lives. Home is where you are known.

And if that’s true, then I know I’ve been home... home is a tangible place, not some ethereal mystery or undiscovered land.

Home is my parents’ back porch, where we played Monopoly for too many mild Summer hours, snacking on thinly sliced apples and sharp cheddar cheese. Home is my best friend’s childhood house- the one I could always walk into without knocking, back in the days before any of us locked our doors. It’s in my aunt and uncle’s “talking chairs”— those armchairs arranged in an inviting circle, in a room strangely devoid of tv screens—where the whole household would gather after dinner, with mugs of decaf coffee and bowls of ice cream.

It’s among the weeping willow-lined banks of the Hudson River, the cobblestone streets of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the gothic architecture of Munich.

It’s in the faces of my friends.

Yes, home is a place I’ve been. And I suspect my globe-trotting friend could say the same.

But then why do we perceive a longing yet to find it?

The homes we find here are signposts to another

I don’t believe in romantic soulmates.... I think there are billions of mates that one soul may choose and commit to love. I guess I feel the same is true for home: that with a careful sense of appreciation, it can be found and rejoiced in a billion times over.

A missionary to India once told my church congregation, that the years she spent in one of the most diverse countries in the world (linguistically, geographically and ethnically), made her ever-more awestruck at the greatness and beauty of God. They way she put it was, God’s beauty and image must be so magnificent, that it can not be contained, either in one kind of face, or thousands. Humans are made in the image of God, but God’s image only begins to be expressed across the canvas of billions and billions of one-of-a-kind beautiful faces.

Perhaps in the same way, the hospitable Earth, with its rock caves, and sheltering trees, and abodes, grand and simple, carries only the mini-expressions of a more hospitable place that can’t be contained here: a soul-tugging suggestion of a greater home beyond this horizon.

Is that the home that we are longing after? And if so, can we ever be fully at home here? On a piece of land, on the road, on the sea or otherwise?

I think in one sense, the answer has to be No. Even the most stable, comfortable and cozy residences that we can secure and nest for ourselves, are inevitably, only temporary. Only as safe as our circumstances, environments and the evil intents of others permit. Only as durable as the materials they’re made from; only as long-lasting as the Earth and its burning Sun allow.

For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.

Hebrews 13:14

But in another sense, if God does intend to use our homes and dwelling places to give us a small taste of the greater home he has prepared for us, then we can expect that he will provide that experience, universally: for all people, at all times, and everywhere.

“In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you.”

John 14:2

Tethered to our true home always & everywhere

Lately I’ve been wearing a necklace- forged from bronze, hammered with craters, and textured so the rough surface gleams like rust and gold. It’s the Moon, hanging as easily around my neck as it does over the expanses of the Earth. I bought it in China, when the closest connection I had to my home country was her face in the sky. She was my old friend, faithful and lovely— a witness of my years, and loved ones far and wide; a tether for a lonely heart.

On my cruise ship in China, every one of my crew members had traded the strength and comfort of their natural families for a strange, mismatched kind— one they were now forced to graft from the people who happened to be stationed in their midst. Their home became the cramped quarters of a ship’s damp hull.

Home isn’t always glamorous or picturesque. Sometimes it’s where it must be... Where the money is... Where your pillow is.

A young shipmate and I got to talking one afternoon, in simple words, wondering where we were meant to find home.

I wondered, “What if we are like kites..... we can fly in the breeze, every which way. But no matter where the wind blows us, our string is tied tightly to something? What if God is holding that string, watching us carefully, and giving us the carefree pleasure of freedom and security at the same time? What if at the end of this string, in the palm of his hand, that is our home, too?

Home in the Four Winds

There is an expression in Chinese, that was gifted to me by a colleague. I say gifted, because in its poetry, a seldom-voiced sorrow of the wanderer is named— and what is named is thereby possessed, and put into subjugation of its possessor.

It is: 四海为家 ( sì hǎi wéi jiā ) , and it means, the Four Winds are Home.

It’s an identification of oneself as a vagabond; a tramp... and one of many.

Isn’t that interesting? To be a wanderer can often be a solitary thing. Wanderers may be the ones who have broken off from the pack; the ones taking risks out of unusual boldness, or unbridled foolishness. They are the ones going it alone.

But something about hearing this saying in Chinese, sì hǎi wéi jiā, opened my eyes to remember the universality of human transience. It’s obvious on examination. There are massive categories of people who have known this longing, collectively, for one homeland or another: sailors, explorers, pirates, migrants, refugees, pilgrims. Some of us will go out, searching for some unknown dwelling in some unknown territory, because we desperately desire to. Some will be forced to leave one shore or one town for another, by a desperate need. All of us, at some time or other will know what it is to live in transition, thirsting and craving after comfort, safety, rest, and love.

I shared the expression with a friend in Germany. A born-nomad, he received the words in the same way I had: with perfect understanding and appreciation in his eyes. Though he hadn’t been studying the sounds of Chinese as I had been, he repeated the tones of each syllable flawlessly. The phrase belonged to him, because the winds did.

I told him about a conversation I’d had with my ship’s doctor, asking him whether his true home was with his wife and child, who he saw for a few hours once a week, or whether it was with our crew, on this ship where he spent almost the full 7 days of each week.

The doctor thought for a moment, and said, “Two homes. When I leave the ship, I’m going home. And when I leave my family to come back here, I’m going home.” He smiled as he realized it: “ I am always going home.”

A craving to bond

My crew, and the doctor, and my German friend, and my globetrotting friend, and me too.... we have all patched together clans of the collections of strangers around us, and called them family. We have made homes among them. Partly we do this to survive: to create networks of trust and knowledge, to surround ourselves in the protection and comfort of a tribe. But what if there is something spiritually primal in this assent to forging familial bonds outside of blood?

Teeth have memory. Those perfect pearly whites that corrective procedures have pushed and tightened into Hollywood straight smiles won’t stay that way on their own. They need to be reinforced with a retainer, or they will start to shift back to their original places within the mouth... their original roots.

Maybe humanity, in forging so willingly these unexpected bonds, is doing the same thing.

When strangers from different physical origins reach out, to make others feel at home; when they overcome awkwardness and strangeness for the sake of building (or reclaiming) unity with an other-faced brethren, they whisper that they remember each other as a real family, from a real homeland that’s maybe not so far away after all.

Refuge in the Shadow of His Wing

One of my favorite books of the Bible is the Book of Ruth. It’s only a few pages, and it contains nonstop drama and some of the grandest declarations of faith and devotion between God & his people, and God’s people & each other.

When wandering, widowed Ruth arrives to her new home city of Bethlehem, she has nothing. She looks evidently different from the Jewish people she has come to live among. She is sure to be the talk of the small town: a stranger from a foreign culture and foreign religion. It was rather unusual for her to have followed her Mother-in-law here, when she could have very naturally turned back to the land of her own family, where she was known and accepted and secure already.

But she had chosen to plant herself in Bethlehem... because she regarded this to be the place where she could grow closer to the Israelite God. Her heart had been so won over to the God of her in-laws, that she could choose the uncertainty of a physical city she had never laid eyes on, because she was certain of the spiritual one it represented.

When a respected person in the community takes notice of Ruth, working diligently in the fields to support her Mother-in-law, he instructs his workers to show quiet favor to her; so that she would be sure to go home each day with her arms full of grain. When she realizes what he has done for her, and asks why, he tells her this:

“I have been made fully aware of ... how you have left your father and mother and the land of your birth, and have come to a people that you did not know before. May the Lord repay you for your kindness, and may your reward be full from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.”

Ruth 2:10-12

It was clear for all to see: Ruth hadn’t sought a home in a city called Bethlehem. She had sought her home in the shadow of the Lord’s wing.

From Strength to Strength

Psalm 84 proclaims the pure loveliness of being at home— with God, in his home. (I think it’s worth it to read the whole psalm— but here are just the first 7 verses.)

How lovely is your dwelling place,

Lord Almighty!

My soul yearns, even faints,

for the courts of the Lord;

my heart and my flesh cry out

for the living God.

....Blessed are those whose strength is in you,

whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.

As they pass through the Valley of Weeping,

they make it a place of springs;

... They go from strength to strength,

till each appears before God in Zion.

Psalm 84:1-7

Home is the place where we are strong. And see how the Psalm describes these pilgrims: Spiritually-bound for God’s city, even as their physical bodies trudge from one dry, desert land to another, they go from strength to strength.

Physical coordinates aside, they never cease to be in a place of security, comfort, restoration. They never stop being loved or known. They go from strength.... to strength. From one home to another. Like my doctor, they are always going home.

For these wanderers and for Ruth, the longing and ache of having not yet arrived at home is answered in this way. The physical temporal homes we now dwell in are assigned a secondary status — and the presence of a near and personal God are regarded as first. They count on the Lord himself to be their covering, their protection and their provision wherever they wander... and he meanwhile assigns them family, a people, and a place to belong and to be known.

At Home everywhere with the-God-of-All-Comfort, and his people

On this Earth, the physical homes and shelters we find for ourselves will be temporary — sometimes dreadfully so. Sometimes we have to buy belonging by the hour- for the cost of a cup of coffee or a piece of cake. Other times we can find it for free on a public park bench... at least until the sun goes down. Sometimes the feeling of home seems like a privilege of the rich. And sometimes I wonder, if God is with the unsheltered, covering them with his Wing in a way that otherwise-comforted people can not hope to know.

But whether we are moving between houses, hotel rooms, tents, or tunnels, we will all know the longing of transition in this life. And when we grow weary, and long for that familiarity and security of finally arriving, “home”, we are experiencing a craving that is unavoidably, and painfully human.

We won’t fully arrive to our permanent, spiritual home until the Lord takes us there himself. But while it is called today, there is a lovely truth for us. Whatever physical shelter we may now find ourselves in, impermanent and imperfect as it may be, some of the mini expressions of our heavenly home are there already.

I look to the Moon in the sky, keeping her dreamy, faithful nightlight on for all of the Earth’s restless children; reflecting greater light.

I watch the intelligent and esteemed world travelers, who enter a foreign land, and, suddenly unable to communicate with words, swallow their pride, and are reduced to foolish, childish grins — intent on wishing peace and goodwill to strangers in whatever way they can.

I look at the families that bind out of neighbors, and colleagues and even transients passing through. And I see how all these people in their own way, are bent to bond and connect. I see the movement of unnaturally uprooted bones; the DNA of a dispersed family, inching little by little back to where it’s meant to be.

And I think, for immortal souls (and that is what all of us are), a part of our permanent, lasting home is bound to be with each other.

Home really is the friends of childhood, whom you loved when your feet couldn’t yet wander far, but your minds could, and you mused about the galaxies, and dreamed of unknown cities, across prairies and seas.

Home is— if not the whole Irish pub— then at least the jovial, arms-wide-open people in it.

Home is that person who has known you in good times and bad, since before you can remember.

And as it turns out, home is even in the oddly familiar step of a newfound kindred- a stranger, yet one who knows you as well as anyone, by virtue of having walked the roads you’ve walked.

The paradox of connecting to that forever-kind-of-home here, is that we have to exchange earthly eyes for spiritual ones. To take hold of that Home that follows, and shelters us in all circumstance, we may have to loosen our grip on the trimmings and trappings of brick and mortar homes that we know won’t last. (Not move out of them and take to the streets of course... the mansions of this life are wonderful blessings too!) But the home that we can long after, with the certain promise of attaining perfect comfort for always, is under the shadow of God’s wing.

The great security of making God our refuge is, that there is no place where we can go that we will be out of his attentive sight. We can’t somehow wander past the limits of his gaze and his protection. He is holding onto us, as to the string of a most precious kite; literally at home in the four winds.

And when we seek refuge in him, he is sure to cover us completely. Under his wing, we can each find a lease to a home - a mansion even- that has our name on it. We can even start “moving in” a little early. Tethered to heaven’s heartbeat, we can start making ourselves at home, with God, now. And amazingly, we’ll find that we are at home anywhere; operating always from a place of security, comfort, love and strength.

Longing for Home —Dwelling Securely in the Midst of Wandering