Emily Parker spoke with author Jo Swinney about her new book 'Home, the Quest to Belong', her experience of being a 'third culture' child and what home means to her.

Emily: How have you made the house that you now live in a place that has meant home to you and also for your children?

Jo: Shawn is an associate vicar so we're in church housing, meaning that it's provided by our church. It's not a house that we own, but I absolutely love it. It's the most beautiful, I guess 1890's, semi-detached with high ceilings. It's got a wood-burning stove in the front room and loads of light in the kitchen. It's the most gorgeous house so I'm hugely grateful for that. I guess it helps being at home in the house when you feel like it's the kind of place you would choose to be anyway.

Then it's things like, I'm really big into art, so we have all kinds of pictures on the walls that we've gathered from here and there, or have been made for us by friends. I think too, what makes it feel like home to me is that we have had so many people come and stay and come for meals, and be here with us, that it is echoing with memories of really lovely times with important people.

Emily: What do think God's perspective of home is?

Jo: God designed all of us to need a home. I don't think we are supposed to put that need on hold for heaven. I think we are supposed to find home now and be home for each other. I think that houses are important. I think people are hugely important. I think that He would love us to find home in our Christian communities and churches. Also there are places in the Bible where it talks about God making His home with us, which is a really amazing concept, that wherever we are, we are at home with God, because God has chosen to be with us and to dwell among us and gives His Spirit to be inside us.

Emily: In the book you mention a few times about David. What have you learnt from David as a person in the Bible and his perception of home?

Jo: I have always really felt I can identify with David and he is the character in the Bible that I feel most drawn to. It's because we get to see inside his head so much through the Psalms and he was very raw; he didn't pretend to be holier or more together than he was. So when he was going through difficult, unsettled times, he wrestled very vocally over those things and he would talk to God about them.

He wasn't at boarding school, but he did spend his teen years far from his family in a palace, completely out of his depth by the sound of it, surrounded by soldiers and trying to appease a king who really hated him. He spent years and years on the run with no fixed home at all. It seems like he found it very difficult. Then eventually he settled in a country and ruled a country through the most prosperous and stable period of its history. He ends up in a palace that has been built specially for him in a completely different way of living. I feel that through his life he's had a lot of different experiences of being settled, being unsettled, having a home, being homeless and we get to see inside his head as he experiences those things through the Psalms.

Emily: For some people, they do have the perception of heaven being an eternal home one day. What is your perception of heaven?

Jo: I very much see it as a restored and redeemed creation. Revelation talks about new heavens and a new earth. The word 'heavens' there is referring to the sky and the planets. So I think the biblical picture seems to me to be of God coming to make His home in a restored and redeemed and made perfect creation, in which He will dwell with us without any barriers.

It blows my mind even trying to imagine it, but I love that Revelation talks about the end of all tears, the end of all pain and all brokenness and this amazing unity between the spiritual realm and our realm, with no separation. I see it as the very best of what we experience now, but mind-blowingly even better and in the very undiluted presence of God.

Emily: What led you to write this book?

Jo: I have been thinking and wrestling over and pondering the question of home for as long as I can remember. And as I have met more and more people here and there and had conversations, and because this is a theme that's been on my mind, I have talked to people about it, I have sensed a resonance with other people who are on the same quest to find what home means.

At one point I really gave up on the hope of ever feeling at home anywhere and because I don't feel that anymore I wanted to offer hope to anybody who might be feeling that way now, for whatever reason.

This homeless feeling can come from all kinds of things, whether it's a relationship breakdown, or the loss of a job, or a changing environment even. It's very unsettling when the world you're used to suddenly looks different for some reason.