Finding home in a strange land

All of us – across the world and of all different faiths and cultures – are pilgrims and strangers, writes Kirralee Nicolle.

BY KIRRALEE NICOLLE

As I wrote about recently, I’ve just moved interstate. After 10 years in Melbourne, I now live in the Adelaide Hills.

It’s a beautiful part of the world, and my children are thoroughly enjoying a more outdoor lifestyle, which currently includes backyard chickens.

But for me and my husband, and at times the children too, the shift has been a stressful one. I’m sure many of you can relate, especially if you have experienced frequent and significant moves. Illness, adjusting to a new town, house and home office and having our friends suddenly far away has all left us feeling a little unmoored and unsure what ‘home’ means.

We’re slowly putting together the pieces of how we like to spend our days in this new place, but as a doctor told me just recently, adjusting takes time, but it also takes remembering what we already liked and enjoyed in our lives and trying our best to preserve pieces of what was, while embracing the new and exciting. Turns out, we thrive on the boring stuff of life, the stuff that doesn’t necessarily change. Familiar foods, hobbies and patterns to our day can help us restore a sense of belonging and equilibrium to our bodies.

But that isn’t always possible. A phrase that has kept coming to mind as I’ve felt those niggling struggles to adjust is “pilgrims and strangers”, the King James Version Bible phrase from Hebrews 11:13. The passage is referring to the people of faith, who, over centuries, had trusted God to provide for them despite not knowing the future or when God would fulfil his promises to them. I pray we all seek to be this kind of ‘pilgrim and stranger’.

The in-between of life

I don’t just think I’m something of a stranger in this new place, my whole being feels it. Nothing feels ‘known’, and while that’s an exciting adventure, it’s also odd.

But what’s also struck me is that all of us – across the world and of all different faiths and cultures – are pilgrims and strangers.

We enter the world as small, vulnerable beings who require constant assistance, and heartbreakingly – depending on where we are born and what the threats are – we may not even get that care that we so desperately need.

When we die, we take that journey alone. When we believe in Jesus, we know we will be with him, but the isolation of death and dying is something many people fear – me included.

Not all depictions of dying paint this as a sad reality, though. In John Williams’ literary classic Stoner, protagonist William Stoner, following a life marked by a sense of isolation and withdrawal, just before death finds himself with a new and unusual sense of contentment.

“There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been,” Williams writes.

Knowing ourselves is an important part of coming to terms with our own isolation, but that knowing is not always easy to achieve.

While none of us can be perfect, the best we can be is together, united in our imperfection and our desperate need of God and each other.

In the in-between of life, our own individual struggles with health, finances, safety or relationships may isolate us, especially in cultures like in Australia, where such issues are still considered taboo, or where because of our status in society, we are overlooked or mistreated.

Stronger together

The power of what groups like The Salvation Army offer is not just the practical assistance and care that is offered with such generosity, it’s the sense of togetherness.

More than anything, the Salvation Army, through its community housing, Alcohol and Other Drugs (AOD) centres, church communities, weekly groups and Doorways services – to name just a few programs – draws together people from all walks of life who are facing some of their most heartbreaking, rocky and lonely challenges.

A problem that was once just mine to fix becomes a problem that all of us face. While that might seem like a source of weakness, it is in fact the greatest strength we have as humanity. While none of us can be perfect, the best we can be is together, united in our imperfection and our desperate need of God and each other.

While I was feeling displaced and lost in my new home, visiting a Salvation Army centre in Adelaide to hear stories of transformation was a reminder to me of what rings just as true in Adelaide as it does in Melbourne, as it does across the Pacific Islands, as it does in Malawi or the United States or Sri Lanka.

The Salvation Army is there to help. And invariably, the warm presence of a Salvation Army worker is exactly what people need to put one foot in front of the other and keep chugging on, even when life feels insurmountable.

And that’s something that hasn’t changed, and won’t be changing soon.