Never Far from Home

with Mabel Ninan | MabelNinan.com

“Did you go home during the summer?” a friend asked. I knew she wanted to know if I visited my family in India.

The answer to her simple question was complicated because, unbeknownst to her, I had been wrestling with the idea of home. Where was home?

Before I immigrated to the United States, home had a straightforward meaning—a house with four walls. Home was a place where I lived with my people. Home was a safe space where I belonged. I was born and raised in Hyderabad, India, and my family moved in the same city only once. After I married, my husband, Simon, and I emigrated to the US to begin a new chapter of our lives together. But Simon’s job as a consultant made us nomads who pitched tents rather than put down roots.

We set up homes in California, New Jersey, and Arkansas in three years before returning to India for a year.

When we returned to the US with our newborn son, we spent seven years in southern California, residing in three different homes. Simon quit his consulting job and took a job in Silicon Valley, where we now live.

At the time that my friend asked me if I’d visited home, I was grappling with both emotional and spiritual crises triggered by the temporary nature of my stays and my struggle to cope with change.

A longing for familiar sights, sounds, tastes, and people made me homesick. Loneliness became my companion. I felt as if I had left behind a piece of me in every home I lived in. I grieved the loss of friendships and community. I craved stability and rootedness.

Questions about belonging and identity rarely left my mind.

I started to feel distant from God and struggled to find purpose and joy.

When I hit rock bottom, I signed up for a women’s Bible study to nurture my faith in the community rather than struggle alone. As I meditated on God’s Word and spent time in conversation with Him, I rediscovered the pleasure of His presence. Joy and hope returned as God recalibrated my perspective, reminding me that, as mentioned in Hebrews 11:13, I am a sojourner on earth, called to pursue His purposes.

How could I feel at home anywhere here? No place or person can satisfy my need to be rooted and belong because I’m made in God’s image, imprinted with a desire to cohabit with Him.

After becoming an immigrant, I realized that I felt completely at home in God’s presence. Intimate fellowship with God is home.

When we love God and set our heart on pleasing Him, we invite Him to take charge of all areas of our lives. His presence inhabits our entire being. “Jesus replied, ‘Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’” (John 14:23 NIV).

Amidst unfamiliar surroundings or unprepared transitions, we can feel overwhelmed, alone, or abandoned. But when we make our home with God, His presence will see us through in a supernatural way, strengthening and refining our faith as we press on. Our home with God is secure and permanent, just as He himself is immutable and eternal.

Writer and podcaster Mabel Ninan is the author of the 2023 Christian Market Book Award: Christian Living Book of the Year, Far from Home: Discovering Your Identity as Foreigners on Earth. Drawing from her immigrant experience, Mabel sheds light on how to find purpose and joy as citizens of heaven.