No Place to Call Home but One

“Where are you from?” It’s a question we’ve all heard, and likely many of us have asked in hopes of connecting with someone we’ve just met. Perhaps you’ve asked it of a recent visitor to your church or the person next to you on a flight. The question is often perceived as quite benign and insignificant, but to me, it is a complicated one. I grew up in South Korea but spent my early adulthood in England, where I became fully immersed in that culture. In 2019, I moved to West Michigan and learned the ways of a Michigander, from summers on Lake Michigan to enjoying apple ciders and sledding with my children. For me, the question of where I’m from is not one I can answer plainly or easily. While I am from all of these places in some sense, none of them can fully capture who I am. I do not belong solely to any one place. I am, in many ways, a sojourner.

Having to go on for a while to describe my background is, in fact, the least of my concerns. The deeper and more existential question that I wrestle with is this: where is my home? Is there a place where I can be entirely myself and abide in peace? Sometimes I lament before the Lord and ask Him why He led me on this complicated and difficult journey.

However, on the other side of that sorrow is a joy that is usually hard to recognize and taste. Not finding a home in any city or nation here on earth has a distinct and beautiful merit: people like me are blessed to long and hope for something beyond this life. Whenever I follow the rabbit hole that is opened by the question of “who am I?” and “where is my home?” I am immediately taken to Hebrews 11. Abraham did not know where he was going. He lived like a stranger in a foreign land. Why was he able to endure such toil? He was yearning for the city whose architect and builder was his Lord. About this point, Calvin declares that the patriarchs would have been foolish "to keep on pursuing the promises when no hope of these appeared on earth, unless they expected them to be fulfilled elsewhere.” [1]

Don’t get me wrong: you do not have to be an immigrant or to live in different places to experience a sense of exile and homelessness. Augustine, in his Confessions, has observed this universal and sorrowful human condition: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”2 The intrinsic restlessness is in every living soul, whether they have a place to call home or not. Perhaps my identity as a stranger makes my yearning stronger, my pain more acute, and indeed my hope stronger, too, but we all desire more than what we can possibly have in this life. We are all on this journey together—because the Lord has made us for Himself. Many search for the true home, but such a quest is futile until one realizes that the only homeland for us is the house of our Father.

In fact, to follow Christ is to become a pilgrim by calling. The Word of God became flesh and came to us in a far, far country. The gospel itself uproots us, calling us away from every false sense of security, and challenges us to cling to Christ. Every disciple of Christ ought to live with a certain displacement. Indeed, Christians are foreigners and exiles wherever we are, as our lives will always be different from those who surround us (1 Peter 2:11-12). We are also citizens of heaven, and our mind is not set on earthly things (Philippians 3:19-20).

As I struggle with not having a place to call my home, as I wrestle with not feeling fully myself in any particular place, I also think about my unique calling. Not having a place to call my own allows me to be a wounded healer of a sort. Like a magnet, I seem to attract people who are just like me. Unintentionally, I gather fellow pilgrims with similar stories, people who feel like they do not fit anywhere perfectly. It then becomes a group of its own, a group of people with no land to claim as their own. We comfort one another, strengthening and uplifting each other as we continue the journey that the Lord has granted us. Is this not what all of us are called to do in this life?

Do you feel lost? Are you at a stage where you do not have a place to call home? I challenge you to embrace those feelings, recognizing that inherent homelessness and restlessness as part of the beautiful way we were designed, built, and created to yearn for the fullness of God. As you continue your pilgrimage, may the Lord hold your hand and guide you—until the day you reach your true home.

Footnotes:

1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 2.10.13.