If You Are Where I Am

I'm never sure where home is anymore. When I'm in Wichita, I tell my friends that I'm going "home" to visit my parents. When I leave my parents' house to head back to work, I say that I'm going "home." And after leaving my "home" in the US, after having been away from Latin America for awhile, I also feel somewhat inexplicably at "home" here, in a country where I've never lived before, speaking a language that still is difficult for me.

It's not that I'm completely at ease here. I think I've experienced the first bits of culture shock this week. Waiting an hour for our driver to pick up volunteers for their flight back to the States, I certainly did a lot of internal grumbling about "Bolivian time." As the lights, water, and internet took turns randomly going out on Sunday, I laughed but really, really wished they'd come back on. Sitting on buses, being openly stared at because of my fair skin and blue eyes, it's fairly obvious that I, at least externally, don't belong.

Yet I love being here. I love the fact that I've started to think in Spanglish. I love shopping at the market, buying strange fruits and vegetables that I've never seen before. I love talking to the women selling food on the street corners and the taxi driver taking us "home" at night. And, while I've already started to miss my friends and family in the States, I know that I will miss Bolivia, as well.

There is a saying that missionaries are never happy except when they're in the airplane. There, for a few hours, they are content, knowing that they are going "home" to whichever home it is that they haven't been at. Once they arrive, they immediately start to miss their other home - the people, the sights, the smells, the sounds.

As I was coming back to the US from Guatemala a few years ago, dealing with culture shock, trying to get to know my own country again, the words of an old Rich Mullins song kept running through my head: "I am home anywhere, if You are where I am."

I repeated those words over and over to myself, hoping that they could be true. And I've come to believe, in the depths of my being, that they are.

I don't know where God will lead me in the future. I don't know if I'll travel to other continents, struggle to learn new languages, or never again travel outside of the state of Kansas. But I do know that this is true. My God is with me. And where He is, I am home.