Article April 29, 1996 Issue

The place prepared for you

Amanda Holmes Duffy

My husband's work in the foreign service requires that we relocate to a different country every few years. Some time ago, I found myself uprooted from a particularly fulfilling life in a country I had grown to love dearly, and transferred to what seemed a totally alien environment. I felt I had lost all joy and focus in my life. At one point, waiting at the checkout line in what seemed an overwhelmingly depressing and impersonal supermarket, I found myself wondering who I was, and if I would even recognize my own groceries when I got them home.

The thought came that our sojourn in this new place was itself temporary. What was the point in making a life for myself here if I was on an endless cycle of inventing and reinventing myself, always moving away from the things I had begun to cherish and identify with?

As I prayed for answers, I saw that I was mistakenly harboring the notion that my life was something I had to carve out for myself in a particular physical place, with particular friendships and career aspirations. I had to give up this concept. I needed to see that my place, along with everybody else's, was not at the whim of material circumstances. I could certainly treasure the good in my previous home, but I had to see it from a spiritual perspective, as something that could never be lost. The places I loved were not outside of me. My experience of happiness and fulfillment in the country I so loved, as well as in other countries, was actually the revelation of something that already existed in divine consciousness. It was spiritual. Therefore, I couldn't be cut off from it. It was a permanent part of my identity as God's expression.

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