I have previously shared that I am the son of a sailor. That will create a lot of different thoughts amongst my readers, I expect. It brings forth many things about my character that will strike a shared chord with other military kids. Most who were children of non-military families may not readily relate to what I am about to share. There are a couple of striking givens to being a military brat. Having no real home is among the worst of them.
As a kid, we moved around a bunch as my father was transferred from base to base. From one house to the next, but we didn’t live there long enough for any place to feel like home. In fact, I was never in any school more than 2 years until I got to high school. My father retired in 1968, my freshman year and I begged him to let us stay at his last duty station so that I could have a normal high school experience. He relented after much discussion and, oddly enough, I went to high school (all 4 years) with the kids with whom I had been in first grade. Auntie Em, “There is no place like home.”
Good and bad baggage
Life moving from pillar to post taught me two life lessons at an early age. The first is that nothing is permanent. There is a built-in obsolescence to everything. Relationships, if you formed them, were never meant to last. A
pretty heavy piece of baggage to burden a young person with. Secondly, because of the first lesson, one had to learn to be outgoing, introverts had no chance if you were going to grow even a temporary relationship. The good news, I guess, is that I learned the second lesson well, developing a gregarious, outgoing personality on the outside, secretly (for the most part) dreading the “next shoe to fall,” wondering when my world would be shattered with a new move.
Home is good while it lasts
My teen years were not uncommon for the late 60s and early 70s. My grades were good and I had friends that I still have today, several decades later. We made wonderful memories, the kind made by people who shared much and 
laughed often. My friends and I enjoyed all the mischief that our small town would tolerate and some that it would not. We were richly blessed, but my transiently-trained heart still longed for something. Not quite trusting all that I loved about my life to remain solid. Not to turn into an ephemeral cloud of smoke to vanish into thin air.
Self-fulfilling expectations
I longed for something permanent. Most of my adult life I struggled with the haunting carry-over, the psychological stigma of the expectation that everything ends too quickly, nothing is permanent. Not meant to last. My 
marriages suffered, as did my early job history. I desperately wanted something permanent, something rock-solid, something that I could call my own. If things were going too well, I would manage to begin to eat at them causing a rift that would eventually cause the split I expected. For much of my 30s and 40s, I thought that the something I craved, my permanent thing was a home. I was not wrong but my mind was not yet ready to see a truth, the Truth that had been waiting for me all my life.
Was blind but now I see
The thunderbolt of epiphany struck one day while having a conversation with my Rector at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Collierville, TN. While speaking
to Fr. Jeff Marx, he told me that St. Andrew’s was my home. The conversation had been a fairly serious one, light-hearted but full of meaning and I don’t really think that Father Jeff was even aware of the stunning understanding that had opened up before me. Nonetheless, my eyes had been opened like the blind man before Jesus (Mark 10:46-52, Luke 18:35-43, ESV )
Please join me in a few of days as I reveal what I learned. I am sure that it changed my life. Not just in part but the whole. There truly is no place like home.