Mary’s Reviews > Between Worlds: Essays on Culture and Belonging > Status Update

These frequent moves produced a need to either wander or rearrange furniture. Sometimes both. It’s a restlessness that cannot be tamed.

Acknowledge place and its significance… In God we are given a full allowance and understanding of this need.

Give voice to a longing… We will have times of intense longing and wistfulness for what no longer exists… Our longings can be expressed through writing, through connecting to other TCKs, through the visual arts, through theatre, through faith, and through friendships, but they must be expressed.

Accept that we are a combination of worlds.

We are not chameleons and we are not impostors.

We wished that we lived closer.

In the shared experience of being other, we find belonging and rest…

A man becomes attached to his place, he becomes one with it. It becomes a part of his person, of his inner self, so that anything that happens to his place also affects his person.

As we learn to tell our stories we understand not only the complexity of our experience, but the complexity of the human experience, the human heart.

Perhaps our unspoken fear is that if we learn to sing songs of joy in this new place, this new land, then we will forget the old, we will lose our identity, all that we know, all that is familiar… Yet this is the beauty of a God of movement, a God of place. He is not limited by geography.

Our journey often begins through the faith and calling of our parents, rooted in the past but grown and sustained through our own decisions of faith.