You Can Never Go Home

Thanks to Bob, Marge, Casey and Ryan for making me feel at home

The other day a friend and I went to a restaurant called “Flamingo” with an English sign on the door and an English menu.  Its a rarity to find such a place in our small town of Armenia, and its even more of a rarity that such a place would have good pizza.  

My friend Don and I chat about my trip home to my family in America.  As I prattle on about how foreign I felt even in my hometown where everything pretty much remained the same, Don, echoing the great novelist Thomas Wolfe, tells me that I can “never really go home again.”

I start thinking about the immensity of change that has taken place in me since I began my Peace Corps experience.  I think about how all life experience grows, stretches, and changes us in some way. 

The idea that we can never go home resonates with me not only because I feel that my experience has impacted me so much, but also because my conception of what “home” is has so radically changed.  

Snakes shed their skin because their bodies continue to grow while their skin stays the same size.  As we gather more of an understanding of who we are and as meaning shapes the purposes of our lives, our houses remain the same size but we shed our conception that anything tangible can really be considered our true “homes.”

Humans long to find a home that we never have to leave. Lydia Brownback writes, “We can have the contentment of home right now, wherever we are, because home for us is wherever God has us.” 

Some of us have to press through the discomfort of leaving our homes, or our friends and family.  But if our conception of home is grounded in faith, then there’s no verb to worry about, because even if we can never “go home,” we’re actually always home.

The restaurant’s pizza was delicious.  Some things – like pizza – remain so consistently delicious throughout the globe, that home is never more than a hungry bite away.  

Weekly Grape:  Have I found myself a home that I never have to leave?