Understanding of Home.

I shared last a few days ago on my instagram how there's something about the red dirt in central Africa. While you are there it's frustrating and you feel like its always on your shoes, feet and getting into everything. Kind of like the sand was when we lived in the Middle East. Now I find myself dreaming of that red dirt roads lined with precious children who want to just be with you, always ready to greet you with a smile. 


The concept of home is a strange one to both me and my hubby. Both having grown up away from our home countries and in other cultures it's always a weird thing to be asked where home is. It's such a loaded question that I'm never really sure how I'm supposed to answer.
It usually has many different answers depending on how I gauge the person asking it.
The simple answer would be wherever I currently reside, which is with my hubby in the Midwest in our home together. That is home.
Yet my family are scattered, my parents live in England on the coast. In a farm area where it takes 20 mins to drive to the nearest McDonalds and all the local stores start closing around 4pm and the average age is probably 60 something. That was home for a while too.
Then there's my university town, the dreaming spires, the history, the people who left prints on my heart during the 4 years I wrestled with life in my early 20s. I went to school there, wrestled out my faith and convictions there, started my career there and also ended it there (but that's a whole other story). That is home too.
The desert town which no longer exists in reality because everyone I knew back then now lives in another part of the world and is in a different stage of life. That's home too.


I think the complicated answer is that every place I called home, took a piece of my heart.
Every time we unpacked boxes and I had a room to call my own, it really became mine for a season. I did life in every single one of those empty shells known as houses, they became homes because of the people in them and the events that took place in them. Home is so many different places to me.


I have never known a building where you come home from the hospital and spend 18 years of life in the small four walls growing and maturing along the way. Redecorating your room every time you outgrew the colors or designs. (For the record a lot of my walls have been white, a luxury of  rental houses)
To me every place you go has the possibility of becoming a home.
Maybe that's why I feel like visiting Kenya took another piece of my heart in the same way. I got off the plane and felt a familiarity, a homecoming to a place where I had never been before. A comfort. I have really only visited central Africa twice. Twice. That's it.
Yet it seems to be permanently etched on my heart. On my mind.


Who knows what the Lord will do with that.