Thoughts on Home

I'm surrounded by boxes and piles of stuff. Packing for a year is such an overwhelming prospect.

Saturday was moving day. It's weird how in a few hours the place that was my home for a year became a shell of a room, a mere four walls void of personality. Translation...the piles of clothes and papers that once "decorated" my room were now gone and you could actually see that the room was carpeted. But seriously, it made think of how much I count on having a place I can call "home" and of just how quickly that feeling of home can disappear.

Rewind to June 2007. I got a call while I was in the Arizona airport. Yeah, just wanted to let you know your apartment is on fire my friend told me. What?!  I would never step foot in that apartment again. I remember making lists in my head of all that I owned and trying to figure out what I would be OK to lose and what would be really hard to live without, and how it made me realize just how fleeting my possessions really are.

The next few months promise to be rather void of the feeling of home. I leave Monday for Colorado for a week of training and orientation. Ten days later it's off to Hanoi for a month of TEFL training and intensive classes. After that we head to the final destination, only it's not completely final. Five weeks in a guest house in intensive language learning and study ensue. Then on September 20 (almost 2 months after leaving Orlando), we meet the rest of the teachers who already live there and will finally settle in (hopefully!) to the place that I will call home...well, for those next ten months.

It reminds me of the truth that is so easy to forget when we are comfortably settled into our lives and our homes... this world is not my home. Abraham understood this and that's why he went to the land of promise. He was seeking not just a home, but a homeland. He knew he was a foreigner both in his own land and in the foreign land to which he was called. And thus we are too, whether we live in the country of our birth or a place with a foreign culture and tongue. We were made for another world. Our true home is a place we've never been.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world." ~ C.S. Lewis