Home

"Home is where your heart is."

With a special invite from my parents, I was able to spend Christmas with my family in Minnesota. And each visit to MN brings up for me the question, Where is my home? Is it with my family in the house that I grew up in? Is it in Colombia in my apartment with my Colombian family?

Maybe it's neither.

MN and all that it encompasses is an important part of me. It's my roots. My "first culture." But living abroad has changed me, gotten inside me. My identity is different, my life perspective is different. So while I love to visit MN, I can't say that I feel totally comfortable there nor that I feel like I belong. Nor totally at home.

I think it was my good friend Jen who once said "Home is where your stuff is." While a bunch of my childhood through college stuff is stored at my parents' house, my daily life belongings are here with me in Colombia. All that good who-I-am-right-now stuff is here. I have dear friends and a full and busy life here. But... I will always be an extranjero (foreigner). Certain ideas, ways of thinking and being will always clash with the overarching culture. And I will always have an accent in Spanish and rejoice, cry and get angry in English.

So maybe it's both. Maybe it's okay to have a heart that's split down the middle. Half of it identifying with the land and people of my first twenty-four years of life. Half of it identifying with the land and people of this beautiful country where God has placed me. It makes for a bit more complicated inner life, but also more enriching. And I'm okay with that.

A dream of mine has been to be bilingual and bicultural. I guess I'll have to add "bi-home-al."