Heart-Healer

You are behind me and You are before me. . .

One of my deepest grieving comes from the loss of not having the continuity I only dreamed of as a child and later queried everyone I met. Where did you live? Did you live in one house all your life? One town? One state? One country? One continent? I didn't have the luxury to answer in the affirmative to any of those questions. I had always been the one moving.

I did my best to thread continuity like beads on a necklace by writing letters, then emails, and finally one-line chat messages with those who had become dear to me in each country. Yet life seemed to happen without me and selfies of smiling faces on Facebook at times were the only connection I had to each phase in my life when I knew I was loved.

Entering my 30s and beginning to explore my identity as a TCK through graduate studies, I began to more earnestly search for that stability in a place or person. I knew it couldn't be where I lived at the time so I returned to the last place I knew happiness as a teenager.

I went to a conference and talked about sharing your story as part of tying together the carpet scraps into an experience that made sense. I knew I hadn't completed the process yet but was learning to be patient with myself. I began to spend my free time exploring, writing, listening to music, crying, as I let the emotions prohibited from being expressed for so long because I had to adapt, adjust, and be strong to survive, now free. I rode the public bus, hair blowing in the wind, completely oblivious to safety or destination, absorbing the simplicity of motion, moving forward without expectations. I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, hiking with strangers on goat paths, snorkeling in an ocean where I couldn't touch the bottom, and eating pumpkin strudel in a castle in Salzburg.

Yet even as I created new memories and remembered the old, I knew I was still searching. I was searching for that touchstone to connect my past with my present. I'd lived too long fragmented; who I was before I left, who I was after I left, and now who I was after returning. Nobody could fully enter into my experience or understand the fears mixed up with the anticipation, the pain with the peace, the belonging with the loss.

Til I heard the song by Tenth Avenue North and I knew. There was One Who had walked with me through every moment, every tear, every joy, every worry, every sensory memory, from the moment I was born in a little clinic in West Africa to today, when I sit in my small room in the Middle East. He was behind me and He was going before me. He was the only One Who could bring together each piece of who I was, gathering them from countries scattered around the globe, to redeem meaning in my life. It was then that I knew I could stop searching. In Him I'd found my home.