The fresh refrain

Apparently, I'm addicted to blogging. Actually, I have this thought that I want to get out, and if I don't type it out now, it'll go away.

Christmas was pretty good. I was way too tired Christmas Eve, and don't remember a lot of it. Jet lag hits me hardest here at night. (It was mid-morning in Kabul, so I don't know what it will be like going back.) Consequently, a lot of my thought process has been kind of scattered and disjointed. There are two themes I have been thinking a lot about recently. The one I'm going to share with you is more of the processing I've been having about home.

Home. Salina feels like home. It is disconcerting to an extent how quickly I can slip back into the "I am home" mode. But home here is disjointed. The rental house that I had lived in for 18 months before I headed to Kabul feels like home to an extent, even though it is slowly cleaning out as I move my stuff out to my parents' place. My parent's place is the same place that I lived in for nearly 20 years while I was growing up, and it feels like home. If my folks ever move out of that house, I think I will feel like I don't have a home in the States any more.

Home. Being with my family and friends feels like home. Even though our Christmas traditions have changed from the same exact pattern that they were when I was growing up, they still have the feel of the familiar to them. Even though my family and I have grown up and changed from where we were, it still feels like home. Even though things are different with my friends in my life and in their life, it still feels like home. I've stayed up late talking and hanging out with my best friend and roommate here, and it feels like home. I got to go out and eat breakfast with one of my best friends from growing up this morning, and it was awesome to get to talk with him and hear about his life and share about mine.

As Ty and I were talking this morning, I mentioned how it was in his apartment in Dallas seven months ago where my life course changed. I was in his house when I read the e-mail offering me my current position in Kabul, and when I read it, I knew that I had to take the job. We also talked about how five years ago, if someone would have given us a chart or picture of where our lives would be, we probably wouldn't have believed them. If we could have looked ahead from our childhood, we wouldn't have recognized ourselves. But yet we could have. Even though we are different, we are still the same. Circumstances may change, some things about our experiences may start to shape us into different people, but we are still the same.

These past few months, I have done a lot of writing, a lot of pondering, a lot of Talking about my future. Home has become an amorphous, abstract concept more than it has become a physical place. The plans that I had for myself seem to falter in the face of the circumstances I have found myself in. I don't know where the Journey that has been set before me will take me. I don't know what is going to change in two weeks, in six months, in two years, in fifteen years. Yet a certainty and a surety has come to me. The grace and peace are with me. There is no where else I could go, and no one else that will hold me close.