This isn’t necessarily about ministry in Nicaragua, but just something that has been on my heart recently. I feel like home and family have been expanding in my heart and mind.
When I moved to Nicaragua I thought that the day would come where I would feel at home in Chichigalpa and that it would then replace my former home. And the day did come where biking these dusty roads, seeing volcanoes, sugar cane blowing in the breeze, and tiny arms thrown around my waist made my heart feel at home. There came a point where I really felt like I live in Nicaragua. That this is home.
However, I can still drive the windy roads of West Virginia, breath deeply as I gaze at the beauty of the gorge from Beauty Mountain, and set foot in my parents’ home smelling a home-cooked meal and also feel perfectly at home.
I’m realizing more and more that it’s not an either/or situation. Home can be both/and. So can family. Home can be both the hot dusty streets of Candelaria and the windy mountain roads of West Virginia. Each is not diminished by the other. Family can encompass the family that I was born into that has always loved me so well, the friends that I have held dearly for so long that their children do not even realize that we aren’t related by blood, the village that has so warmly welcomed me into their homes and lives over the past 6 years, the revolving door of community that I have been able to live and minister alongside at New Song, the family I’ve found amongst other expats who love the same people and culture that I do, and the extended Kingdom family that I have been brought into at Adventures in Missions who are all fighting to build the same Kingdom in their own little corner of the world.
The ideas of family and home can be so much greater and wider than we knew if we allow our hearts to expand and to love both broadly and deeply.
If Nicaragua has taught me one lesson, it’s that there is always room for one more. The same is true with family and with home. Our heart always has room for one more. So, today I just want to take a moment to gratefully praise the Lord for the places I call home and the people I consider family. The list continues to grow and I’m so glad that it does.
I love this Lisa!!!!
This is really timely for me to read as I continue to process having left my last home of 10+ years in Reno for a new home in Oregon…I love Oregon so much and have wanted, at least on some level, to live here at some point in my life for over 3 years now; but leaving my friends and especially my family behind in Reno has proven to be just as heartbreaking as I had anticipated. I’ve been thinking a lot about wanting to keep roots in both places…your thoughts here reflect my own and encourage me that it is possible to have more than one home.