“If you came back, you wanted to leave again. If you went away, you longed to come back. Wherever you were, you could hear the call of the herdsman’s horn far away in the hills. You had one home out there and one over here and yet you were an alien in both places. Your true abiding place was the vision of something very far off, and your soul, like the waves, always restless and forever in motion.” —Johan Bojer
I’m not sure there is another people group on earth that relates to “home” in as complicated a way as the Third Culture community does. Home is kaleidoscopic for us. The savors, smells, sounds, textures, and lifestyles of our past hum like static in the background of our present. We live in a state of perpetual nostalgia. Those places that have crawled inside our consciousness, the languages that have told our stories, the cultures that have rippled around and through us, the remembered agony of imposed goodbyes and mandated transitions—they are anchored to our DNA and embedded in our cells.
And they are Home.
But they are not a single space. As Tolkien wrote, “We feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
Home, for us, is muddled and meaningful in its indescribable, life-defining sense of identity. Sometimes it buoys and charms us. Sometimes it challenges and bruises us. And sometimes it reminds us that we can’t return again. The pain of that discovery can be a visceral ache.
Whatever its manifestation, we all, to some degree, carry the blessing and burden of our previous planets as we dwell between past and future. Some of us try to silence or ignore the melancholy longings for an us-shaped, soul-familiar place. Others of us let the yearnings drain the color from the newest sphere we’ve entered.
While Home is most simply defined as a significant place of formative bonding and shelter, Belonging is the sense of wholeness and likeness we might find in that place. Yet so often, we struggle to discover the sturdy and lasting social sameness and communal embrace we seek. Further complicating our pursuit for that stable, intimate, and life-giving form of connection is the fact that we may not have experienced it in a significant way during our mobile formative years. How are we supposed to find something we cannot recognize?
Though an ache for Belonging is built into the human experience by our Creator, for some of us TCKs who don’t feel that a complete sense of “wholeness and likeness” with one culture will be possible, Belonging might remain an individual notion—customized to each personality and life trajectory. It will also remain a flexible concept, as whichever form of Belonging we choose in one season may not be the one we carry into the next.
I’ve witnessed six major incarnations of “customized Belonging” in the MKs I serve. Each comes with distinct pluses and minuses attached it. None is without challenge. Regardless of the sticking points, each will—if only temporarily—meet our deeply human, intrinsic need for the kind of Homeness that makes us feel welcomed, valued, relevant, useful, validated, and hemmed.
Nuclear Belonging
In their youth, some MKs will center their sense of Belonging in their nuclear family—that’s those who are fortunate enough to find their most trustworthy source of love, attention, and meaning among parents and siblings. They’ll declare that Homeness exists wherever mom and dad are, where each member of the family contributes to forming a self-sufficient unit, intensely bonded and devoted. Those children know that though the world around them will inevitably and continuously change, their family’s fabric is both sturdy and elastic enough that the vagaries of life and ministry will not destroy it.
Kindred Belonging
Other MKs will find Belonging in a subculture of kindred spirits—MK schools are a prime example of this. How many of us have found a comforting form of sameness in these spaces where our backgrounds may be different, but the way those backgrounds shape and inform us is a powerful shared trait?
That connection to others whose lives have been as rich in cultural inputs and experiences as ours is something we may continue to pursue in our adult years, seeking community with people who have lived between worlds, as we have, and whose perspectives are as broad and nuanced as our own.
Diverse Belonging
In contradiction to Kindred Belonging, I’ve found that some MKs begin to find a sense of self in pursuing difference rather than similarity. In this case, Belonging will feel like the variety they knew while growing up between worlds. Between the colors, cadences, and curiosities that charmed and challenged them. There will be something familiar—something they recognize and identify with—in circles where there are few people who resemble them, and they’ll derive such energy from navigating those waters.
These are the MKs who spend their lives moving from new environment to new environment, because they feel such profound Homeness in places where they’re outsiders.
Activist Belonging
The intense drive and purpose of our formative years will lead some of us into social spaces where we feel a similar kind of energy—a communal laser-focus on addressing a serious concern together. Because so many MKs are desperate not just for community but for intense belonging in a community, they’re prone to search for it in circles that are militant or marginalized, because the fervor of activism feels so familiar and galvanizing.
These MKs in search of a tight and focused social embrace might leap into the deep end of new communities without always assessing what they’re getting themselves into. And once they’re in, even if there are reasons to second-guess their decision, the sense of belonging they find might feel so good that they won’t follow an impetus to step back out again.
Relational Belonging
Other MKs won’t truly experience Home until they find it in a stable, bilateral, committed relationship—like marriage or something similar. It’s my suspicion that this is often a factor in MKs who choose to marry early. They see the future as a place where Belonging may be difficult to find and prefer to quickly latch their lives onto a known and loved entity rather than risk floundering in their pursuit of something that could prove less dependable.
Internal Belonging
This is the incarnation of Belonging I’ve found most helpful as I’ve navigated life between worlds. With Internal Belonging, the quest for an external sense of Homeness becomes less of a preoccupation, because we realize that the places and people that formed us are an active, living force we carry within ourselves—not something we need to reproduce in our current context or in the years ahead of us. Our many homes are planted in our spirits, informing our understanding of life and the world, offering an internal sense of belonging, even when its external form is difficult to find.
Though Internal Belonging is by nature less connective than other forms of integration, it can be a helpful alternative if we reside in circles where External Belonging isn’t possible—or isn’t yet possible. It can calm the dissonance we feel when parts of our identity are shadowed and remind us of the precious, multi-faceted Homeness our mobile lives have offered us.
There are likely other variations on Belonging among MKs and TCKs, but these are the ones I encounter most frequently. If you have the time for some introspection, I encourage you to consider what I’ve outlined here and determine which variation is the most present in your life. And then contemplate what its advantages and disadvantages might be, so you can thoughtfully manage its helpful and more harmful side effects.
I need to add that although as humans we are wired for Belonging, there are certainly times in our life when accepting unbelonging will be preferable to choosing a dangerous facsimile.
Our natural search for belonging and Homeness is so complicated. So dizzying and—in many cases—unsatisfying. Until I considered the spiritual reality of Home and Belonging, I consistently struck out in finding that profound sense of—as I mentioned before—being “welcomed, valued, relevant, useful, validated, and hemmed.”
It’s in beginning to view my relationship to God as my Home that I’ve found a bit of an answer to the complexity and grief of my homelessness and unbelonging. By digging deep into what’s in God’s heart for me—comfort, joy, hope, direction, goodness, truth—I’ve learned to center that in my daily reality, and in doing so have found a constancy that transcends time zones and cultures.
I know that faith can be just as complicated as Homeness to so many MKs, and not all of us walk away from our experiences with an intact faith. But if we can pitch our nomad’s tent on the unchanging foundation of who God is, how he sees us, and what he wants for us…perhaps then the lostness so often associated with a TCK’s mobility will find solace.
If we can set our goals according to his heart and find our fulfillment in cultivating his benevolent intentions, the kaleidoscope of our past will find a present and future purpose that doesn’t require a constant redefining of “Home.”
Will I still feel loss when I remember my past communities? Of course, I will. Will I still crave familiarity and connection to the places I once knew? Without a doubt. The hunger for Home and Belonging is human, universal, and good.
Being wrapped in God’s presence and inspired by his heart doesn’t eliminate the yearning, but it soothes and redirects its sting. And it grants global nomads like me the mobile stability of soul-intimacy.
[To listen to the audio version of this and other articles, please follow the Pondering Purple podcast or click here. Find more of Michèle’s resources and novels at michelephoenix.com.]
