Not My Home

Today I received some news that dear friends of mine will have to leave the place where they have spent about 30 years building lives - the lives of their four amazing children, the lives of those around them that they've been able to share hope with and see transformed, the lives that come from a call to leave your home culture in order to give up everything and follow the irresistible pull to someplace overseas.  This sweet couple followed that call without any thoughts of looking back.  Yet, now, a new law is causing them to quickly and unceremoniously leave the place that's been "home" for such a long time.

Having been raised where I was, with parents such as mine, it would have been nearly impossible for me to grow up and be anything shy of a flag-waving, card-carrying, full-fledged patriot, fully aware of the benefits of my American citizenship and upbringing.  I would consider one such benefit to be the relative assurance of the survival, and success even, of my beloved nation and (due to my citizenship) my being welcome there so long as our mutual survival endures.  However, as one who studied and now teaches on the rise and fall of great empires and cultures, I'd be a fool to place all my hopes and assurances in even such a winsome-looking statistic.

Living here, it's easy to be reminded that this home in particular just isn't permanent.  Although some things have certainly become my new normal by now, far too many still feel entirely foreign.  Likely many of them always will.  Between that and the current uprooting my dear friends are experiencing, I'm so grateful for the reminder that none of this is permanent.  My hope and my trust must be in something greater, in Someone more lasting than the ever changeable laws, the nations, or even time itself.  Anything less is just dust in the wind.