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What is Home?

I am having a headache from all the noise downstairs but this is the unfortunate stuff we have to bear with as a result of living in shared spaces.

Today I bumped into one of my ASEAN Scholar friends, we managed to have a little conversation, something I treasure a lot now. In the days of old, we all stayed together in hostels and such occasions were a common activity rather than the rarity it is today.

"Would you stay long in Singapore?"

She suddenly asked me. I asked myself that all the time. I didn't really gave an answer but since it sounded like she was thinking about it, I asked her what would make her stay and what would make her leave?

As she was sharing her reasons, I asked her if she felt a disconnect every time she went back. I asked her this because for a while now, every trip I make home, I feel less and less that this home. It is not anybody's fault but it is the way it is.

Home was a memory twelve years ago. Each time we head back we discover that the place grows more and more distant from that memory. To the extent that it has become something else altogether. Kuching had headed on its own trajectory and it had experiences and journeys that it made which we did not share and we were not there to experience together. It is like seeing someone you haven't met for a long time. They are different now.

She said, she could relate to all of that.

This presents a crisis for us because we don't feel entirely at home in Singapore either. And the home that we once knew is feeling less and less like it.

There is so much I could go into here but I already know this is not home. When I come "home" to my rented apartment, I know the bed I sleep in is temporary. Who knows where I will be a year from now. Rentals may increase, the owner may suddenly want her house back. The housemates I am living with will leave eventually and one is already leaving in June. (We managed to find a close friend who will be moving in thus sparing me the hassle. Life is already way too busy.)

Without the Word to sustain me, I am pretty sure I will be despairing already but I am very grateful to God for letting me feel the full brunt of my status as an exile or a sojourner. The experience has definitely gone a long way to shape me because understanding that everywhere on earth is not our home is precisely what God wants.

As sojourners we are meant to crave, to long, and to plea for that return to be imminent and know that we will one day feel the full satisfaction and reunion with everything the we have lost in the beginning.

I always love how the apostle Peter opens his letter. By choosing to call the people he is writing to exiles, he reminds them that wherever they may be when they are reading the words that he penned, that place may be a city, a metropolis, a thriving Roman city but it is not home. And it never will be home.

"Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ,
To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia,  according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood:" (1 Peter 1:1-2)

One day the emptiness from whatever it is we call home at the moment will disappear. 

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