Photo by Pilottage

By Melanie Mar Chow

Are we home yet? As the holiday season comes to a close, those who traveled for the holidays will eventually return home.  Reflecting upon the year’s end, I realized that 2010 did not allow me to go home for the holidays. An unfair assessment? If you know me, you’d say “Silly Melanie, you were home!” because as a Southern Californian, Christmas was in Monterey Park, CA. Prior to this year when my family moved to South Pasadena, “home” was Alhambra. But when I talk about not having gone home for the holidays, I am referring to the home of my youth — Seattle, WA — where I was NOT present at Christmas.

Having pondered this off and on, questions regarding my concept of “home” arise. Is a hotel a home? I travel a lot, and find that wherever I am with my immediate family can be considered “home”. A hotel can also be a home depending on the amount of possessions brought along for the duration. My car can be a home, as it is for many homeless folks.  Or perhaps our country of origin is considered “home”? As a multicultural Asian American woman, when I visited both China and Japan, I thought that perhaps I could call those places my home. But without an ability to speak the language very well, I felt like a stranger.

Growing up, I remember the evenings my parents had their television on and hearing the all-too-familiar Spanish accent of Ricky Ricardo pierce the airwaves with, “Lucy, I’m home!”  His reference to home was the apartment that he shared with his wife, situated next door to the Mertzes, his neighbors. Is home where loved ones await you?  I recall the words from the song “This is Home” by the band Switchfoot which accompanies the closing credits of the second Chronicles of Narnia movie, Prince Caspian. The lyrics portray a different picture of home:  “I’ve got my memories, always inside of me, but I can’t go back, back to how it was.”  These lyrics voice the challenge of not being able to go back, but having to search to find a place to call home, and then having to consciously acknowledge what has now become home, different from before.

The big question for me as I wrestle with another year of seeking and following after Jesus is, If our true home is heaven, am I an expat on this earth? Expats, shortened from the term expatriate, is someone who is residing in another country, a place different from one’s upbringing or legal residence. Of Latin origins, it means “out of country”. If we are ultimately to be living with our Heavenly Father, are we foreigners even in our earthly homes?

One unearthed treasure, published during the height of my challenging seminary years, helped me to understand the answers to my questions about home. In their 1989 work called Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon challenged many Christian leaders’ viewpoints as conveyed by their book’s subtitle, A Provocative Christian Assessment of Culture and Ministry for People who Know Something is Wrong. The book encourages  the Christian community to live our lives on earth as an expat experience.  So with this in mind, as I began with this question, I now pause to ask it again:  Are you home?

Rev. Melanie Mar Chow serves God through Asian American Christian Fellowship, the campus ministry division of the Japanese Evangelical Missionary Society (JEMS). She has been an ordained American Baptist minister since 2004. A Pacific Northwest native, she currently lives with her husband and daughter in Southern California. To contact Melanie, please send your inquiry to aawolsisters@gmail.com.