Coming 'Home'

As the saying goes “Home is where the heart is.”

Within the last 48 hours, I have traversed three continents – three countries, three cities – that I call ‘home.’ After a tear-filled parting from my former host family in Bursa, Turkey, I returned to Berlin, Germany – a former and future ‘home’ – for 24 hours and said good-bye to more friends. Now I am ‘home’ – in the U.S., that is.

In many ways I have come home – to the country where I have spent the majority of my twenty-three years, the country where I vote and hold citizenship, to the city of Washington, DC, where I still occasionally have a mailing address on Parkwood Place, where many of my closest friends still linger, and where I have claimed many of the beliefs and values of my parents as my own.

But in many ways, this is not ‘my home.’ It is still ‘my home,’ but not in the exclusive sense of the phrase that defines the ‘home’ of childhood and adolescence, and sometimes even our young adulthood. My friends here, my family, my faith community make this place home for me – but only one of my homes. As a result of the encounters that I have been blessed to have, the people I have met, and the friendships I have formed, my heart lies in many places. Pieces of my heart remain in Rochester, in Berlin, in Washington, in Bursa, and, yes, even in Essen. Other pieces are scattered to the far corners of the world where I have ‘traveled’ through the journeys and stories of my friends – in Kansas, Madagascar, Syria, Chicago, Kenya, and Palestine.

So, I have come ‘home’ to (re)connect with all those faces, friends, and family who have captured my heart and make this place one of my ‘homes.’

And certainly, no one said it better than Dorothy: “There is [indeed] no place like home.”