TCKs understand the true meaning of “home” better than most of the world—they just don’t realize it while they are young.

I was raised as an MK in the mountains of Papua New Guinea (PNG). For a boy who loved exploring the jungle and climbing trees, this was paradise. Leaving PNG at age 15 to move to Missouri farmlands felt like losing my home.

Years later, my children were born and raised as TCKs in Indonesia. When they transitioned to university in Los Angeles, it took a while for them to feel like L.A. was home.

Now I teach a high school course to TCKs in Indonesia, preparing them for that transition back to the nations their parents call “home.”

Many seminars and articles on TCKs focus on this common challenge that I faced, my kids faced, my students face, and all TCKs face—where is home? And how can any place where we don’t fit in feel like home?

As a kid, I knew I didn’t fit in America. At every church we visited, I was asked to speak New Guinea language, but no one wanted to know the real me. I felt like a circus freak, desperate to get back to my jungle home.

I once asked my son if he felt more at home in America or Indonesia. After a long pause, he answered, “Singapore. In both America and Indonesia, people think I’m different. But in Singapore [a highly multicultural city], everyone is different.”

When multicultural TCKs join a community that is mostly monocultural, they experience a strange tension of simultaneously envying those who experience a sense of rootedness in that community, while judging them for being shallow and narrow-minded. They long for lives of stability without giving up their breadth of experience.

The fact is, monocultural people’s sense of home isn’t from roots in the land, but in the consistency of a community that knows them well. This is something TCKs also experience, on a scale more deeply and more widely than nearly anyone else.

One of my American students told me how China, where she grew up, felt like her home. When I asked why, she said that she felt known there, by a community of “grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins” who all raised her. When I asked if she had the choice of meeting all those people again in Thailand or going back to the town in China with none of them there, she answered, “Thailand,” even before I finished the question.

TCKs have an innate sense of belonging to a family that is bigger than their biological one. If you visit our house in Indonesia, you’ll find that every family photo on the wall includes people not related to us, but whom we consider “family.” Most TCKs have this type of family in spades—they can travel the world and always trust “family” to pick them up at the airport and take them home. Deep under the surface, this connectedness with a global TCK community extends roots out all around the world. When storm winds blow, TCKs aren’t anchored to a land but to a network of family that is eternal.

What are the implications of this? First, this broad family network gives TCKs a keener understanding of heaven being our true home, because that is where all our global family will be united as one. As Revelation 21:1 promises us, one day there will be “a new heaven and a new earth… and there was no more sea.” Finally, no oceans will separate us from those we love from the various nations where we’ve lived, and we can all be together again.

One of my most profound moments of 2024 came when our youth worship team led our student body of TCKs in singing a portion of a song from The Greatest Showman, a story of circus misfits who find belonging only when they’re with each other. As the worship team kept repeating the bridge about coming back home again, I was moved to tears. Everyone in the room struggled to find a geographic sense of home, but we all understood in the deepest part of our hearts that wherever we TCKs are together, we experience home. TCKs live with “eternity in their hearts” (Eccl 3:11) more easily than many others do.

A second implication is that TCKs are uniquely equipped to bring heaven to earth in fulfillment of the Lord’s prayer. TCKs are used to seeing the brokenness of their world without letting it break them. I watched my missionary parents pray our family through poverty, pain, and danger, pressing on to serve others. This equipped me to lead my family through riots, bomb threats, police interrogation, and driving through an angry mob chanting, “Go to hell, America,” while still serving the poor, the drug addicts, the criminals, and the prostitutes. Those times when we’ve helped a young person get set free from an extremist group, sex trafficking, or demonization, we could almost hear the angels singing as heaven invaded earth.

All of the brokenness TCKs experience may require a healing journey from traumas before they are ready to take on the world. But once they are healed, TCKs often become some of God’s best change agents. Is someone needed to step into a war zone—either literally, or in a school, workplace, prison, political party, etc.? Send a TCK. They are often calm in chaos, willing to hear all sides, and perceive more than the words spoken to them. They are mobile, adaptable, durable, multilingual, multicultural, hyper-observant, bent towards peacemaking, live with a sense of purpose, and are rarely satisfied with lesser things. By faith, they can display heaven’s values of extreme love, supernatural joy, and unreasonable peace.

So this is my advice for TCKs who are longing for a sense of home: The more that TCKs orient their lives to working together with their giant global family of TCKs from many ethnicities, cultures, and generations, to bring the atmosphere of heaven to all the varied corners of the earth that TCKs inhabit, the more joy and belonging they will experience. Rather than seeking stability in a geographic location, they’ll find a rootedness that is outward and upward, spanning both the globe and eternity.