You're not from here, are you?

It's a question that I get asked quite a lot here in Ecuador, by perfect strangers as you can imagine. People in the bus, taxi drivers, shopkeepers...

"No," I reply with a patient smile, "I'm from Scotland... the United Kingdom... Great Britain... Europe?"

The answer, or number of answers depends entirely on who I'm talking to and their geography general knowledge; there was one taxi driver who thought Scotland was a part of Russia.

There are rare occasions when engaged in conversations with aforementioned strangers that I am mistaken for somebody from Quito, and I take this as a compliment to my Spanish, knowing well that my "blonde" (by Ecuadorian standards) hair and eyes (for which I was once congratulated by a lady on the bus) should have given me away.

Every time I arrive back in Ecuador after having spent some time at "home", in Scotland, there is always a period of re-adjustment and of "letting go". I talk about "switching modes". Living in a different country to the one you grew up in, being married to someone from a different culture and who has a different mother-tongue to you, means that terms like "home" become a bit mixy. It means your "factory settings," as it were, become a bit more customised than they once were. When you no longer dream in just one language, when you don't even remember which language you had a conversation in, when you're imagining a conversation in your head and realise that isn't the language that person speaks... things become kind of mixy.

Many people in my situation, spread between two different places (or more), find themselves in the same situation. We are puzzle pieces, once belonging to a certain picture, who have adapted themselves to fit into a new one and now find that they no longer truly fit in either. We are the "armadillos", as Rudyard Kipling might put it, no longer hedgehogs or tortoises, but something different. (See The Beginning of the Armadillos, The Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling to understand!).

As I think of these things, and how my beautiful little daughter will probably feel the same, not belonging anywhere completely, I hold on to this truth:

"LORD, you have been our dwelling place in all generations." Psalm 90:1

No matter where I find myself on this earth, for He may yet take me to new places, I know that in Him I am home. In Him I find my peace, my resting place, my strong tower, my refuge and my rock. He is mine to cling to and I am His child.

None of us are really "from here" anyway. Like Abraham, we look forward in faith to a city whose foundations are designed and built by God Himself, remembering that we are part of a Kingdom that cannot and will not be shaken. For now, we are all in an in-between place, in between two realities, being transformed into the likeness of Christ and yet still in this body of sin, waiting for the coming of our redeemer when, in the twinkle of an eye, we will be changed. We are in this world, but not of it, and we feel the tension as both sides pull at us and vie for our full attention. "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:24-25)

And so we do give thanks, in all things, to the One in whom we do truly belong, and find our resting place, and for whom we wait with joy.