by Brian Indrelunas, Wesley Council member

I can feel at home anywhere, I always tell myself. Every time I visit or revisit a city, I seem to fall in love with the place and make mental plans to move there someday.

It happened a few weeks ago when I traveled to Washington, D.C., for United Methodist Student Forum. It happens whenever I go to South Los Angeles to volunteer or work for Sierra Service Project. Perhaps the only exception to the rule is my deep aversion to ever living in Gallup, N.M.

Having grown up all over the United States (I had lived in five states by age 15.), home was always a fluid concept for me.

So, of course, when I landed in Cape Town, South Africa, at the beginning of my semester-long internship at the Cape Times newspaper, I quickly fell in love with the city that many of my friends had called the most beautiful they had ever seen and I began to think about how I could make a return trip to stay for good — or how to accidentally miss my flight back to the US at the end of the semester.

And over the course of nearly three months, I had some amazing African experiences. My internship at the Cape Times placed me within arm’s reach of a cheetah, upon the flight deck of a warship at sea, and in touch with a renowned South African theologian. In my more touristy moments, I rode to the top of beautiful Table Mountain in a cable car, took a ferry to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were once held and met new friends hailing from all around the world.

But as I saw the sights and reported the news, I also had another, equally valuable experience: While I was correct in presuming that I could make almost any place in the world home, Gallup notwithstanding, in South Africa I learned what it actually takes to truly feel at home.

Unlike all my other travels, which have sent me to faraway locales for only weeks at a time, I set up residence in Cape Town for a matter of months, and I did so as an adult. No longer did I have my family along with me to ease the transition. No longer did I have a new school full of kids my age with whom I’d spend most of my days.

Because I lined up my internship myself, I found my own place to live using online classifieds. I booked my own plane tickets. I organized my own weekend plans. There was no tour guide, no professor leading the trip, no organization or university handing down an itinerary.

It was like a trial run, with a set end date, of being a truly independent adult — minus the fact that my hostess offered to do my laundry for me. (Independent adult or not, that’s an offer that very few 22-year-olds can refuse.)

For the first few months, I relished my newfound, though temporary, status as an independent adult who worked all day, paid rent, and ironed his own shirts — after Eileen had washed them. Still, it all seemed just like the shorter vacations that I had taken to other places around the U.S. and around the world.

But there’s something special about the two-month mark. All of a sudden, what once felt like a vacation started to feel like a long-term move.

After two months in Cape Town, the city began to feel less and less like home. Although I had done a good job of finding a place to rest my head at night and an internship that kept a passion for journalism running through my veins each day, I had neglected to find a home for my soul.

Sure, I had attended worship services once or twice at Central Methodist Mission, just around the corner from the Newspaper House. But working on Sunday kept me away many weekends, and I found it difficult to make my ever-shifting lunch break fall exactly at 1 p.m. on Tuesdays so that I could attend Central’s midweek service for working folks.

That would have been often enough for a vacation, but I found that if I were to ever call Cape Town home for the long-term, I’d need to be a part of a church family in a way that requires more than just dropping in for worship once a month.

Still, even though the realization that I hadn’t connected to any sort of community of faith in my temporarily adopted hometown was a sad discovery to make, I consider myself fortunate to have realized what I was missing.

That’s because for the past four years, I’ve found that type of community at Wesley Campus Ministry. Years ago, a past campus minister had Wesley-themed notepads printed up that called our campus ministry “a place to call home.” Knowing how Wesley stationery tends to hang around forever, there may still be some of those notepads floating around the Baker Center, but even if they’ve all disappeared, the long-ago slogan is still something that holds true for Wesley. Our campus ministry provides a much-needed spiritual home for students who come from across the country or even (as in my case) from another part of the Valley.

Even while I was slacking off and not fully engaging with the big-C Church in Africa, I still felt connected to Wesley from afar, thanks to the periodic messages sent by e-mail or Facebook detailing the latest happening that caused people to rhetorically wonder, “Where is Lunas?! Why isn’t he here?” Now, as I start to look toward graduation and the prospect of being an adult indefinitely, I’m ready to take what I’ve learned from my trial run and search for a new place to call home, not just in employment and housing ads but also in the church.

It’s my hope that I can find a community as uplifting as Wesley wherever I move next, and it’s my prayer that back here in the Valley of the Sun, Wesley will continue to offer a spiritual home to many more students in the years to come.

Brian Indrelunas is a senior at Arizona State University majoring in journalism and mass communication. He has attended Wesley since his freshman year and is currently a member of the Wesley Council and Wesley's Board of Directors.