If I were to ask you, “where’s home?”, what would you say? It’s much easier to say “I’m from a place” or “I grew up in a place,” but home isn’t always the same place as where you grew up.
As the world grows more transient, home becomes a harder place to identify. Families moving every couple of years lose a sense of place, and worse, their kids lose part of their identity. It becomes difficult for them to even say where they grew up. Another bi-product of being transient is kids grow up learning that the relationships they make rarely last. They will be starting over in a few years anyway. This can even creep in for adults, especially those who tend to be more introverted.
What is the tradeoff? What are we so readily exchanging the phrase “home” and deep roots for? What’s the value of being known in a place? What’s the value of being able to say I’m from a place? To some the value is another $10,000+ and the potential of a higher ceiling in their career. Is there a price that you can put on a good friendship?
When I say friendship…I’m not talking about someone you can chat on the phone with or go to dinner with. I’m talking about the type of friend who would help you pay your mortgage if you got in trouble and you would feel comfortable asking them to.
It takes time to find people you click with and even more time to begin to bond and move beyond a superficial level. When you move frequently you start all over. You lose your history and the time you’ve invested in that place. Sure you still have connections and acquaintances in that part of the world, but those individuals move on too. You now start the search over again for people you click with and then the work of moving beyond the superficial. There is no such thing as instant friendships.
Friendships take work. Here is something else I’ve observed…if people sense you aren’t in it for the long haul and that you’ll be moving at the first chance you get…they tend not to want to move past the superficial. Can you blame them? You’ll be leaving soon and they have to start over. That may sound more calculated than you might like, but with so little time for extra-curricular activity in life it’s easy to understand where this logic comes from.
What would it look like for you to invest your life in a place? A place where your history is known and a place where you have history with.
Maybe you think, “well I have family or friends from college.” Family is important and so are great college friends, but would your family be willing to move to help you? Would your college friends? What happens if you find yourself in the position of being on the giving end instead of the receiving end toward your family? A sick parent or a spouse can be a tiring journey in which you wish you had a network of support and encouragement that was in the same place you live.
My point in all of this is that I want to challenge you to spend the time you have not just working toward a career goal, but toward building a full and rich life with people around you who love you and whom you love.
It would be a sad day to have the nicest home in the neighborhood and no one to invite over who knows the history hanging on your walls.
How great would it be to invite people over who were involved in your life when most of the framed pictures in your house took place? How full of a life would it be to have the same friends through the birth of your children, their graduation, marriage, and then grandchildren?
What do we give up in exchange for trying to gain a bigger slice of the world? (Matthew 16:26)
