My life has always had a lot of transition. It’s one of the things that pastor’s kids and military kids have in common. Moving from place to place, meeting new people (and losing them too), and constantly having to learn the new procedures and expectations of new schools, neighborhoods, and even churches. As a kid, I dreamed of a day when I could grow up and choose my own home and pattern of living. I was going to buy a big house with a bunch of land in a community I loved, and I was just going to stay there forever and never move again! I just wanted to find that perfect place where I belonged. A place that God would pronounce as my forever home. However, life, as they say, is what happens when you are making other plans, and it is clear by the fact that in the last 5 years (well into my adulthood) we have moved 3 times that God had other ideas for my life.
Over the years, I have instead found myself learning about the practice of making home wherever I find myself. Of practicing hospitality even when I am the stranger and the newbie. It is an act of faith on my part. A faith that even as I am making a home for myself in a new place, I am also making a home for God there, too. It is a spiritual practice of attempting to embody the face of God for others who might also find themselves in a season, or lifetime, of wandering. To be the hands and feet of Christ in whatever neighborhood or community I find myself.