There's No Place Like Home

My concept of home has become quite ambiguous over the past few years. Those of you who have lived in multiple locations over the course of your life (especially if one of those locations was outside your home culture) will understand what I mean. They say that "home is where the heart is," but what if pieces of your heart are scattered all over the world? I have left pieces of my heart in various locations worldwide, and I've felt at home in Georgia, Tennessee, Austria, and North Carolina, but today wouldn't classify any one of those places as the one above all others where I feel at home. I've heard from a few different sources that "home is where your stuff is," and that's the definition that I've adopted at this point in my life. For right now, North Carolina is where my stuff is, so it's home. Fair enough.

The concept of home can get particularly tricky when you start talking about a home church. I'm currently "church searching," a process that I have found simultaneously exhausting, encouraging, discouraging, nerve-wracking, and emotional. I've driven away from churches in various moods - cheerful, tearful, somber, and shocked. (The shock came mostly from one church that employed the use of smoke machines during worship. Oh. My. Goodness.) Yesterday, as I drove home from the sixth church I've visited in the Triangle area, I realized that perhaps the reason I'm struggling so much to find a home church is because my definition of HOME is so "squishy" right now. While I don't doubt that the Lord has me in North Carolina for the foreseeable future, and while I deeply value the concept of putting down roots and becoming part of a community of believers here, the uprooting process I went through in leaving Austria is still fresh on my mind (and those roots were only three years old).

With all of that being said, I'm giving myself some grace to let my new roots come in gradually, especially while my soul settles into the fact that North Carolina is home for now. I'm also relearning (and cherishing) the concept that nowhere on this planet was meant to be my eternal home. The Lord is my Home, and He never changes, though my physical location may change a dozen more times before my life is over. He is the safest place in which to put down roots, and I trust that, in His timing, He'll show me the right church family to join as I walk through this part of my journey.