What does “home” mean to you? Two articles this month, from Alexa Sharma (p. 30) and Daniëlle K. (p. 42), touch on the meaning of this common word.

When an AFM missionary uses the word “home,” it can be a little confusing. Are they referring to the land of their birth or their current address? “Home” typically conjures images of comfortable dwellings or towns lit by the warm glow of lifelong familiarity. But when missionaries speak of home, they might just as often be referring to a tiny apartment in a grimy eastern European city, a shanty rough-sawn out of an Asian jungle, or a mud-brick shelter in the African bush. Warm glow of familiarity? Trade it for the harsh dazzle of an alien culture. What audacity to call such strange, distant places home!

This is a transaction all AFM missionaries make—familiar for foreign, homeland for frontier. In the bargain, they gain rare insight into the true meaning of home. Home isn’t place, it’s relationship. And as their hearts are knit together with their friends and communities, they discover that the process reverses—foreign becomes familiar, frontier becomes homeland. As Alexa Sharma said, “One day you just look around and realize that they’re not “them” anymore—they’re family.” The places we live are just temporary shelters along the road as we travel toward our real home, gathering as much eternal family as we can along the way.

“In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14: 2, 3).

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