Stories in this episode: After a close call with a missile in their homeland of Lebanon, Nazar and his family move to a new country where "home" continues to elude him until a fortuitous introduction changes everything; Audra's urgent feeling to put down roots after a recent move to North Carolina unexpectedly leads her back to the spiritual home she'd left years before. SHOW NOTES This episode is sponsored by TOFW. To see pictures, and find links mentioned in this episode, go here. To find out more about the themes we're developing for upcoming episodes, follow us @thisisthegospel_podcast on Instagram and Facebook :) TRANSCRIPT KaRyn Lay: Welcome to This Is the Gospel, an LDS Living podcast where we feature real stories from real people who are practicing and living their faith every day. I'm your host, KaRyn Lay. For anyone who might not recognize it, today's theme comes directly from the end of the movie The Wizard of Oz. After a harrowing journey through dark woods and narrowly escaping the sleepy poppy fields along the yellow brick road, and then finding her voice after a whirlwind adventure into glitzy city life, Dorothy has a choice to make: Should she stay in the bright lights of Oz, or should she go home to the black and white world of Kansas? In the end, the call of home and Auntie Em wins out. While I know I can't be the only one whose childhood was slightly marred by those flying monkeys and shriveling feet under the tornado house, I also know that I'm not the only one who found comfort in that moment. That moment when Dorothy realizes she only has to click her heels together three times and repeat the phrase, "There's no place like home" to be transported back to her Kansas farm. The truth is that now, as a 42-year-old adult human being, I sometimes, like Dorothy, wonder where I am and how exactly did I get here? I can be filled with a sense of not quite belonging to my surroundings, just like she did in that technicolor Land of Oz. Maybe you've felt that too. I sometimes wish I owned a pair of Ruby Slippers or a Star Trek transporter or something that has the ability to send me off in the direction of home with little more than a blink of an eye. Sometimes that home that I'm longing for takes the shape of the Keystone state and hills covered in trees. And sometimes it looks like just doing the dishes with my mom and dad in the kitchen in South Carolina. And sometimes I find that the home and the family that I'm really wishing for, is actually nowhere to be found here on Earth. Well, today we've got two stories about the way that we define home and the way that home can come to define us. Our first story comes from Nazar for whom the idea of home was always a bit of a moving target. Here's Nazar. 2:10 Nazar: One of my earliest childhood memories that I have is when I was five or six years old, playing in the living room with my older sister who was about a year and a half older than me back in Lebanon, where we lived. And while we were playing in our living room, I heard a sound that caught my attention and I looked towards where my dad was, and he was on the balcony of our six-story apartment building that we lived in. And I saw this huge missile fly right by him. And from my viewpoint, it looked like it was going to hit him in the head, but it was probably about five or six feet away from him and hit the building next door and blew up the building next door. And as a five or six-year-old, you can only imagine how I was confused and scared and you know, quickly thereafter, my dad rushing, picking us up and taking us downstairs to the bottom of the building into the bomb shelter. That was my earliest childhood memory that I had—to escape the war that was happening. My mom had already left. She had moved to California and she was doing all the paperwork needed for us to get our visas and so forth so we could also move to California. And I remember my mom used to tell my sister and me stories of how California was amazing and it was beautiful and there's no trash on the streets and people didn't litter. She painted this picture of this euphoric, beautiful place. We moved here and obviously, it was you know, it's definitely cleaner than Lebanon's was, but it still didn't feel like home to me. My ancestors have been moving around from place to place to find a home, to find a place of refuge and a place of just peace to be able to live for over 100 years. I was taught by my parents and my grandma about the genocide that took place in the early 1900s. Armenians in Armenia were massacred, over a million Armenians were killed. And when that happened, a lot of them obviously, to avoid being killed, were kind of scattered everywhere. And because of that, the Armenian people have been displaced for over 100 years. I remember hearing stories from my grandma that when she was younger because she grew up in that, she was a young kid during the genocide. I believe her father was killed and she had to eat dirt, to try to get some type of nutrients so that she could stay alive while she escaped the genocide and—just horrible experiences and horrible stories that I was told by people that actually lived through it. And so my ancestors went from Armenia to Turkey, from Turkey to Syria, from Syria to Lebanon, and that's where I was born. And my parents emigrated to California. So we just kind of moved around from place to place. And it was really tough learning the English language, and I had no friends and it was just a, you know, like most people that move around, it was a difficult time. I remember I would a lot of times walk home from school. I would notice all the houses around me. We didn't live in a house, we lived in an apartment building. And I would look at these houses and I wonder what the inside looked like. And I would wonder where the kitchen was and how the kitchen looked, and the bedrooms and living room and I wondered who lived there and what type of life they had and always yearning to be able to have that. Just yearning to have a home that symbolized permanence and it symbolized safety and security and comfort. When I was about 13-years-old, my father informed us that we had a cousin that he knew that had, you know, lived in Fresno, which is up north in California, where—we lived in Southern California. When I was 13, we went and visited her. And I remember as we were driving up, it was a very, very long drive. And we finally got that was excited to be able to be out of the car and they had a pool, so we were swimming in the pool. And for some reason, my sister who was 14-years-old at the time, felt impressed to ask our cousin about God. And to give you a little bit of background on my thoughts on God, at that ripe old age of 13 is that I was always an inquisitive kid. When I saw people that were blown up to pieces back in Lebanon, or just in general when people pass away, I always inquired about or wondered about why we're here? What is the purpose of this life? And I wondered if there was an existence before we came to Earth, and what happens to people when they die? That always puzzled me. And I would ask my parents, I would ask people around me what the purpose of life was. And I would ask these questions, and no one had an answer that made any sense. Now Armenians claim to fame is that they're the first, you know, group of people or you know, nationality to accept Christianity. And so they were staunch Christians, Armenian Orthodox is what the religion was. It's kind of similar to Catholicism. I'd go to church and I'd asked the priests there and I would ask my friends, and all of them what say that I just need to have faith that there was a supreme being, there was a God, and that He could be everywhere and that He could be next to you and He was all-powerful and all-knowing, and it was just so mysterious. It didn't make a lot of sense to me. And so I've, in my mind, decided that God was just an answer to the unanswerable questions. And what I mean by that is that I just felt like if there was a question that no know the answer to, they would just either blame God or have God be the solution, right? And so I decided that I was going to be an atheist, that I didn't believe in God. When we arrived at my cousin's house, we're playing around, my sister felt prompted to ask my cousin about God. My cousin could have easily given her a one or two-sentence explanation of that God is our Heavenly Father, and that He loves us and we're His children? But she didn't just stop there. She said, "You know, I could explain about God. But I've got two friends that could do a way better job of explaining to you who God is." And so she invited the missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to come and have dinner with us that evening. They're pleasant and nice. And the very next day, they wanted to come back and have some missionary discussions. Well, my parents didn't have intentions of staying there for the week, becasue they had to go back to work, but they allowed my sister and I to stay there for that one week so that we could spend some more time with our cousins. Well, while we were there, the missionaries came to the house again and started talking about God. And I quickly told them my opinion on God and how I didn't believe in Him and I thought He was made up. And they, you know, respected my belief and my opinion, and they asked me to just listen to them. But while I was up there, my cousin had a pool and so I had no desire to really listen to what they had to say. I was more, you know, excited as a 13-year-old boy would be, to swim in the pool when it was hot in the summer. So I didn't pay much attention to them there, but after the week, my parents picked us up and brought us back down to Southern California where we live. And those missionaries contacted the missionaries, you know, by where we lived, and those missionaries came to
