Feeling Far From Home with Esperansita Bejnarowicz
The Allender Center Podcast
The Allender Center
4.7 • 647 Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2026
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Have you ever felt like you were living between worlds?
Maybe you've moved across countries or cultures. Maybe your family story carries immigration, missionary work, military life, trauma, loss, or displacement. Or maybe, even surrounded by familiar people and places, you still carry an ache for belonging — a longing to feel fully known, rooted, and at home.
Today, Dan and Rachael sit down with Esperansita Bejnarowicz, who is a story coach, an NFTC Certified Facilitator with the Allender Center, and the founder of Far From Home.
Together, they explore the hidden grief, loneliness, and longing that can come from living "far from home" — geographically, emotionally, spiritually, and relationally.
Esperansita reflects on the experience of living between identities, cultures, languages, expectations, and communities, and the ways these in-between spaces can leave us carrying forms of grief that often go unseen or unnamed.
The conversation also considers the story of Jesus as someone deeply acquainted with displacement: a child forced to flee, a man who "had no place to lay his head," and someone who understood sorrow, exile, and longing for home.
Through her own story and the stories of women she now serves through Far From Home, Esperansita offers language for the ache of leaving home, the complexity of belonging nowhere and everywhere at once, and the loneliness that can exist even when life appears beautiful from the outside.
Whether you've crossed borders or simply know what it feels like to search for belonging, this conversation offers language, comfort, and hope for the parts of us still longing to find home.
You can learn more about Far From Home at:
https://www.womenfarfromhome.org/
About the Allender Center Podcast:
For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.
At the Allender Center, we value thoughtful dialogue across a wide range of voices, stories, and lived experiences. In that spirit, our podcast features guests and hosts who may hold differing perspectives. The perspectives shared on this podcast by guests and hosts reflect their own experiences and viewpoints and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, or endorsements of the Allender Center and/or The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.
Stream each episode, plus find transcripts, additional resources, and more at:
theallendercenter.org/podcast
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https://theallendercenter.org/2025/11/podcast-support/
If you and your organization would like to partner with the Allender Center Podcast, please reach out to Clay Clayton at cclayton@theallendercenter.org
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you've been doing some personal work, maybe through journaling, therapy, reading, or even listening to this podcast, and yet still feel like there's something missing, you're not alone. |
| 0:14.5 | Our stories were never meant to be engaged in isolation. |
| 0:18.6 | That's why participating in a story workshop with the Allender Center can be such a |
| 0:23.2 | powerful next step. I'm Rachel Clinton Chen, and I want to personally invite you to this unique |
| 0:29.0 | in-person experience in Seattle. Over the course of three and a half days, you'll receive live |
| 0:34.8 | teaching from Dan Allender, Wendell Moss, and myself, and other Allender Center instructors. |
| 0:41.5 | But what makes this workshop truly transformative is the time you'll spend in a story group, |
| 0:47.3 | a small, intimate setting, led by a trained facilitator who will walk with you as you engage a part of your story with care and courage. |
| 0:56.0 | It's a space marked by compassion, reflection, and healing, a space where deep change becomes |
| 1:02.4 | possible. If you're feeling called to take your storywork further and to do it in community, |
| 1:08.6 | this might be the next step you've been looking for. |
| 1:11.9 | Learn more and register now at the Allandercenter.org slash workshops. |
| 1:17.7 | We would love to have you with us. Thank you for listening to the Allender Center podcast. |
| 1:39.7 | I'm Dr. Dan Allender. |
| 1:41.2 | And I'm Rachel Clinton-Chen. |
| 1:42.6 | We're fiercely committed to providing hope and healing to a fragmented world. |
| 1:47.2 | And restoration for the heart. |
| 1:49.7 | Thank you for joining us. |
| 1:51.0 | Let's get this conversation started. |
| 2:08.6 | Good people with good bodies, including you, my trusty colleague and friend, Dan Allender. |
| 2:13.2 | We are privileged today to have a guest that I think you are going to love. |
| 2:25.5 | And it's not uncommon for us to have experiences of liminality, meaning that like threshold space in between where it can be really hard to find a sense of grounding or identity belonging. |
... |
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