“When are you coming back home?”

It’s a question I get every time I return home.

What’s different about it now is that I get it from two different places when I return.

In my own head, I’m starting to question what “home ” even really means. The first two years I spent in Malaysia, I made a conscious decision not to call it “home.” Doing so felt like a betrayal – as if I were permanently cutting off the place that I had called home once before.

But I’m starting to see that home is a flexible word, one that can accommodate multiple meanings, and safely wrap around each of them.

My journey across the world started with one particular Biblical passage (Hebrews 11:13), talking about those who died in faith: “not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.”

This past summer, now that I’ve had time and space to think and breathe for a bit, I’ve felt like I’ve become unmoored, yet at the same time deeply anchored. A paradoxical, or maybe just nonsensical, feeling. Yet, it fits in the grand narrative that God has written in my life. He has made it so that I am solely anchored to Him – deeply rooted – and nothing, no place, no object, no person (no matter how precious) can take His place.

In many ways, this has been deeply painful. Areas I thought that I could depend on for fulfillment, relationships I thought I could rely on, have suddenly been taken from me. But even in the gap and aching spaces, I am not foundering. It doesn’t mean the losses haven’t had an impact, but it does remind me that they were never meant to provide stability and surety anyway.

As I am about to start my fifth year in Malaysia and feeling a restlessness inside me of wanting to seek new lands and opportunities, I am starting to rediscover that home can be in different places. Home is where people know you, where familiar foods can be eaten, old hangouts visited – that whole feeling of belonging or familiarity. For me, it is now both the smog-ridden air of Malaysia and the scorching summer heat of Texas, the freshness of mango bought from a vendor at the pasar malam or the tangy creaminess of the guacamole from our favorite burrito shop near our Frisco church, the deep beauty of the tropics or the open grandeur of a blue sky over corn fields. The friends and family in both places that can pick up where we left off – though changes and loss are still felt and mutually grieved.

Sometimes it’s difficult to never truly belong somewhere. I’ve felt the frustration of having lived in and explored a country for four years yet being asked questions that would normally be reserved for visiting tourists. It’s a bit disheartening to know that you will never truly be a part of a place because you are distinctly, inescapably foreign. But the reverse can be true too – when you’ve had your eyes open to different cultures, perspectives, and lands and you get back to your home country and realize you don’t fit in as neatly as you used to.

But I’ve felt the sweetness in that as well. God’s gift in showing me, as He promised, what it means to live as a sojourner. In displacing me from a home anywhere on earth, He has shown me that my true home is nowhere in this world. This in turn has helped me to better value the people and places where I am for however long I’m there for. When nowhere is home, simultaneously everywhere is a temporary home. Therefore, I can love deeply and truly wherever I am because home is where God is and God is always with me.

As one of my favorite songs, based on a favorite hymn of mine, “Psalm 84” says,

“When I sit at Your table
I am right where I belong
In the doorway of my Father’s house
I’m home”

And ultimately, I am heading to my true home that will encompass all the best parts of my homes here on earth.

So…am I coming home?

Always.