Africa, my home

“Lord, I think I could live her for a long time,” I prayed silently.  “I think I like it here.”

I sat outside the internet café and watched the people walk by.  I had been in Africa for less than 24 hours, but I felt at home like I had never felt at home before.  As I watched the amazing variety of faces walking past me there in Dar es Salaam, I felt like I fit in in a way I had previously thought was impossible.

Maybe it was the instability in my life growing up.  “There’s no place like home,” means something different to me than to other people.  Where is home?  What is home?  There’s no place that is like home to me.  At least, that was true then.  For various reasons, my family had moved around incredibly often.  I once counted that in the ten years of school I attended, I attended 13 different schools.  Sounds like an unlucky number to me!  Five high-schools.  My first full year in one school was in seventh grade.  I have no idea how many different houses or places I have lived.  After my parents divorced, life became even less stable.  We were shuttled back and forth between our parents like ping-pong balls, or pawns in a game we didn’t really want to be a part of.  Two of us would be with dad, two with mom, then after a few months it would change again.  I think my parents wanted what was best for us, it was just not possible for them to provide stability. 

When I graduated from high-school I was done with the school game.  Got a job, then another.  Then the Martins offered to sponsor me to attend Mission College.  I had started to get tired of work after two years, so free education sounded like a decent deal.  I attended, and there a new life began.  One night I encountered a supernatural Being who was good and kind and loving, and everything I ever wanted.  I found forgiveness and freedom, and my heart began to heal.  I began to see that I belonged to Somebody who accepted me and wanted to spend eternity to me.  I wanted nothing more than to tell others about what I had discovered! 

Two years and two months later, I was in Africa.  Mom told me she figured I would end up in Africa someday.  As a child I loved stories about Africa, and the stories of the civil rights movement in America made a tremendous impression on me.  As I sat and watched the real Africa walk by, I felt like something inside of me was being completed.  As the varied faces of Africans, Indians, Arabs, Chinese, mingled with an occasional Caucasian, passed before me, I found a new family.  I felt I was born to be a missionary in Africa!  The next three years would only confirm that for me more and more.  There were times of intense loneliness and discouragement.  There were times of miserable failure and sickness, but through it all, it seemed I was where I was meant to be. 

Could it be that in some cases, the very things that make it difficult for us to know where home is are the very things that prepare us for service in another culture?  Could it be that some of us are longing for a place of service that is far from the country we have grown up in?  I have come to believe that the instability of my life growing up, the lack of roots and long-lasting friendships, is one of the very things that the Lord allowed for me to be able to appreciate Africa and fit in there.  Perhaps I am not the only one who was born to be a cross-cultural missionary!