“You have to put down roots.”
The only thing more troubling that she could have said came next:
“And if you are going to put down roots somewhere, that means you cannot hold on to roots elsewhere.”
Like an arrow aimed straight at my heart, Michal Ruth’s words cut through my ribs to the tender places in my chest. I sat in my chair in Indianapolis, realizing that this was a clear articulation of something I had been hearing in my prayer times.
There are changes happening in my life. That is easy to see. There is going to be a move that takes me 7,000 miles from my home. There is going to be language and culture differences. There are going to be changes in everything from community to recreation to food to time schedules. And yet, over the last weeks, I have started to sense another change that has already begun inside me.
Something is happening to my identity.
We could go into a long philosophical/theological diatribe about the way that our communities and contexts impact the collection of experiences that we call a “self,” but I’ll just refer you to my friend Jeremy Smith for that one. For now, I’ll just affirm that there is something significant about our context that informs our identity.
But what happens when you don’t have a context? And what happens when you change your context dramatically?
What happens when you make the choice to put yourself into a context that will always view you as a foreigner?
I have already written about my adventures in homelessness. It’s been 3 months and I’m still wandering. Don’t get me wrong, I have had some beautiful experiences of hospitality and community along the way. However, there is something different about belonging as a guest and belonging as a member of a community. There is something profound that happens with commitment in relationships. There is something significant about having roots.
If I’m honest, I’ve been jealously longing for rootedness lately. I have been looking around and wishing I had some of the stability that comes with commitment to a location. But I had to give that up when I made the decision to follow this call to Germany. And if I’m honest, I’m still a bit afraid of what it means to put down roots in Germany. Because I will always be American, and yet for a time I need to give up my ability to belong to America. And I will never be German, but part of the task before me involves carving out an identity that is rooted in Germany.
Belonging to both. Belonging to neither. And yet, choosing to make a home in the one. Now this is going to be tricky to navigate.
Still Wandering,
Tony