The evening was turning colder as I watched the passenger jet ascending in the clear, night sky, its beacon lights blinking rhythmically. The roar of the engines began to fade as the plane climbed higher, racing into the darkness.

“Do you miss home?” My friend’s question caught me off guard. It took me a moment to decode his query from Thai to English.

“My home in America?”

He nodded.

“No, not really. Sometimes I miss seeing snow. Really, I just miss my family and friends there. We don’t have a house there. We lived in India and Nepal, and now Thailand. I don’t really know where my home is anymore.”

My friend smiled at me thoughtfully.

“I guess home is the place where I sleep at night. So this is my home now. Do you know what I mean?”

My friend smiled again and laughed softly. “I understand.”

I appreciate how attentive my friend is. He was observing me with empathy, considering how I might be feeling living in Thailand as a foreigner. Without my saying a word, he sensed something and wanted me to know he cared. He wanted to connect with me.

I used to think that being a missionary was about traveling to a foreign country and learning to speak the language and understand the culture so I could transmit the message of the gospel to the people. But now I realize that God wants more than that. Reaching people is about reconnecting and re-forging the bonds of fellowship Adam and Eve shared with each other and with God before sin shattered it all. The message isn’t words, it’s the Word, reuniting with us as we reunite with each other. And even though I might travel to the ends of the earth to be reunited with my brothers and sisters, I know that I’m already home.

“As you come to Him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:4, 5 ESV).

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