Too Foreign For Home, Too Home For Here

He stopped claiming either one about six years ago and nobody noticed the day he stopped.

Here, he is asked where he is really from, which is a question with a floor under it. Twenty three years, a mortgage, two children born in this hospital, and the question still arrives about once a month, usually kindly.

There, when he goes back, he is the one who says a word slightly wrong and gets corrected by a cousin with warmth and no cruelty at all. His aunt calls him the foreigner as a joke. It is a joke. It is also, after twenty three years, a report.

And so what happens is a kind of quiet withdrawal from both claims. He does not say I am from here and he does not say I am from there, and if you press him he will make it into a small comedy routine that he has honed and that gets a laugh, and the routine is about four years old and it exists so that nobody has to see the actual answer.

He is not bitter. He wants that understood. He has a good life in the country he lives in and he loves the one he came from.

He simply has no table where he sits down without being slightly explained.

You know that. Maybe not two passports. But there is a room where you are the guest and another where you have become the visitor, and nobody in either has noticed you stopped claiming.

Say the cost first, and do not make it noble

There is a way of writing this that makes the in between sound rich and interesting, and it is a lie, so let us not.

It cost him a place to be tired. In both countries he is slightly on, slightly presenting, and the difference between being at home and being welcome is that at home you can be dull.

It cost him his children's sense of where they come from, which he thinks about more than he admits, because they have his face and this country's vowels and no answer either.

And it cost him the six years of the routine, which was funny the first time and is now a small performance he does at parties in place of a self.

You have been standing between two claims and quietly making a joke of it, and God has never once required you to establish where you are from. Psalm 139:2 says He is acquainted with all your ways, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes acquainted off a page and puts it at a courtyard table with a man who is slightly on in both countries. He has never asked the follow up question.

He has prepared a city, and the preparing is done

There is one line built for a man with two passports and no seat.

But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he has prepared for them a city.Hebrews 11:16

Two things in there and both of them are for him.

The first: God is not ashamed to be called their God. That clause is aimed exactly at a man who has spent six years being slightly explained in every room. There is one place where he is claimed without a footnote, and the claiming is not reluctant.

The second: He has prepared a city. Past tense, completed, and the preparing was done by somebody else while these people were still living in tents, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes prepared land as a settled fact rather than a future consolation.

You are claimed without a footnote, and the claiming was finished before you ever had to answer the question. That is not a lovely reading of a hard chapter. The written word makes the not being ashamed explicit and the city prepared, and the Spirit is the one who makes claimed something a man can feel at a table in either country.

And I want to be careful, because this site would be a cruelty otherwise. Nothing here makes the in between good. It is not a gift and it is not a calling and no article of mine is going to tell you that not fitting anywhere has made you deeper.

What this does not fix

I am not going to tell you the question stops. It will not. Somebody will ask it again next month, in that kind voice, and there is no sentence in this article that makes the moment itself easier.

What can change is the routine. The comedy exists because there was nothing else to put there, and now there is something else to put there, and you do not have to say it out loud to anybody for it to be doing the work.

You have a claim on you that no room in either country issued, and it does not require either of them to agree. Hebrews 11:16 puts the city as prepared, and His Spirit is the one who makes a written line into a seat at an actual table.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the in between has gone somewhere heavier, if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line first. That is not a weakness in somebody living between two places. That is God sending help with a face on it, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.