When someone asks me where I’m from, I hesitate.
I’ve never quite figured out how to navigate the small-talk staple without it becoming a trick question. My brain kicks into overdrive as I mentally scroll through the list of possible answers. By birth, I’m from Georgia. By parental lineage, I’m from Texas. By personal preference, I’m from Alaska. To give any one of those answers wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but neither do any of them feel entirely right. Instead of naming a hometown, I’ve made a habit of plastering on a wry smile and announcing, “I’m from nowhere.”
Inevitably, my answer catches people off guard. Their eyebrows knit together and their foreheads wrinkle in confusion as they try to make sense of my response. For a split second, I wonder if I should have simply picked an easy answer. To do so, though, would be disingenuous.
Growing up as the oldest child in a military family, I spent the first eighteen years of my life bouncing around the United States. My mother, who spent most of her own childhood in a single house, minutes away from her grandparents, often lamented the constant moves my siblings and I endured. As a child, I didn’t fully understand the apologies she made. And, though I knew my life was different from the lives of most of my friends, uprooting every couple of years was the only way of life I’d ever known.
It wasn’t until I started college that I began realizing what I might have missed out on. During freshman orientation, when my new friends talked about the homes they left behind — towns they’d lived in most of their lives — I couldn’t relate. The house I’d left was one I’d lived in for a measly two years. I didn’t leave best friends; I left surface-level acquaintances. I didn’t leave a place that formed me, or neighbors that watched me grow up, or a community whose history I’d watched unfold. At best, my roots were shallow. I never learned what it means to belong.
My husband and I have lived in our current town for eleven years now — more than triple the length of time I’ve lived anywhere else. Even still, I get The Itch: an unshakeable sense that it’s time to move, to leave, to start over somewhere new. It’s what keeps me from hanging pictures on our walls or investing time and energy into decorating our home well. While part of me longs to settle in, to believe that I have created stability for myself, the truth is that I feel just as unmoored now as I did when I was a teenager.
Long before I began wrestling with what it means to have a home, Moses wrote about the same longing. In Psalm 90, Moses declares, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations” (Psalm 90:1 ESV). Moses knew what it was to live without permanence. He spent forty years in Egypt after being taken from his people as a child, then forty years as a shepherd in exile, followed by forty years wandering through the wilderness with the Israelites. Moses was always moving, never settling, never fully belonging where his feet were. And, yet, despite a lifetime of displacement, he named God as his dwelling place.
The Hebrew word Moses uses for “dwelling place” is מָע֣וֹן (maon), a word which can describe both physical and metaphorical places. For the Israelite people, a dwelling place was more than just a place of shelter and safety — it was also representative of an identity and community. Home wasn’t just where they lived; it was who they were and how they were known. In calling God his dwelling place, Moses invites all of us — whether we’re wanderers or not — to view home through a different lens. Our home is not a place, but a Person.
I think I’ll always tell people who ask I’m from nowhere, and I don’t anticipate that the tension between wanting to settle and wanting to leave will ever subside completely. But, if God is my maon, my dwelling place, then I’m not unmoored. I am not without a place of belonging. I am not without a home.
If you know God, no matter where you are, you’re home too.
