"Home is in many places"

Many people call the place of their childhood "home." In my childhood, there was not only our actual home, but there was also another home. It was created in my imagination by my father's bedtime stories. In them, he described the vast skies of Africa and the wild beauty of landscapes unknown to me. He had grown up in South Africa.

I wanted to work as a pastor and missionary in the land of the bedtime stories of my childhood. But things turned out differently. Instead of South Africa, Ecuador, the USA and, finally, India became the destinations that became my home away from home. In 1999, my wife and I travelled light to the place that was to become our new home, our home away from the heat of the lowlands at an altitude of 2,000 metres: Kodaikanal.

That was a long time ago. Our thoughts and memories keep wandering back to that home in the distance, where we were at home in a foreign country, where we lived and worked.

What remains of that time? The women's project that my wife helped to set up still exists. The school where I worked also remains. Every now and then I meet people who were students for one or two semesters at KIS, the international school in Kodaikanal, through the exchange programme that I co-initiated back then. Of course, I also meet Indians who live with us in Germany, and sometimes such encounters bring back old memories.

What remains? It is what connects us as people, the everyday things that make up our humanity, the hopes and worries that we share. What also remains is the certainty we have gained that we can be temporarily at home in many places. But what also remains is the hope of faith that there is a home that points beyond the stations of our present life. A home with God.

 

Lars Dedekind studied at the missionary seminary in Hermannsburg. In 1999, he was sent by the ELM to Kodaikanal in India, where he lived with his family until 2008. Today the pastor lives in Braunschweig.