For those who end up being replanted in North American soil…
About 27 years ago, Cal and I left the US for the mission field. We were young and strong. We had a healthy sense of who we were, where we were from, and knew that God had spoken to us. We left behind extended families, barbecue, football, tulips in spring and leaves in the fall. We preserved the memory of places and people in our hearts.
Over the years, we learned languages and foods. We ministered and taught. New workers were welcomed and later sent back to their original homes. Nationals resisted, listened, believed, baptized, and grew. The years passed, and we kept returning to the US for 12-month stints between our 4-year jaunts on other continents. The kids grew and graduated and married and gave me grandbabies. We made it all the way to pension time, filed our paperwork and boarded the plane for…somewhere.
I don’t know what to call this place.
We’ve been back in the southern part of North America for a while now, but I have no idea where we are, exactly.
This isn’t the place I left. The library has moved. The train doesn’t run through here any more. The high school isn’t the one I attended, and the church is part of a multi-campus behemoth. I know nothing remains static, but somehow my home out there distracted me from seeing the differences in this place every time I came around for a visit.
I think, though, that the issue is not where we are. I think the problem is who.
Cal and I, we’re not the people who left here. What I think is important the local folks don’t; what they think is important makes no sense to me. What they find funny makes me sad, and what makes me laugh is non-sensical to them. Their favorite TV programs seem so vapid, and I don’t enjoy the same sports I grew up watching.
We have been forever changed.
I’ve consistently perceived Cal and I as catalysts for change. We went out into the world in order to teach and make disciples. We watched the gospel message change lives and worldviews. I saw individuals alter, families improve, and communities strengthen. I watched people learn to praise, to pray, to teach. I saw values improve. Change happened all around me in response to His message.
What I never saw, though, was how radically it all changed me.
What did I expect, though? I went out into the world assuming that the only things that would be altered would be stuff outside of me. Pretty silly, I know, to think I could drift through life unadulterated.
Faced with the burden of being His spokesperson, I prayed more than I ever did. I read more of the Bible. My desire to be able to give an answer to all who asked drove me to memorize and categorize. I studied and created lessons and crafted Bible materials. I memorized stories in three different languages. Spiritually, I was bound to change.
I listened to thousands of hours of sermons, spiritual food shared from a cultural perspective radically different from my own. Did I really think I could do that and remain exactly who I had always been?
I debated the meanings of Scripture with brilliant people who had worldviews that led to different interpretations. Was I so naive as to believe I could learn new ways to perceive God without somehow becoming new myself?
I read newspapers in other languages written by people with a different set of assumptions. I deliberately learned the joy of various other sports and spent most of my adult life enjoying them. I saw a different rules at play in the same social issues I’ve always known about, and watched the impact play out very differently than I did in my middle class upbringing. I pursued and chased and loved a culture that is nothing like Dixie.
Did I really think I would come through unscathed? Unaltered?
Yes. Apparently, I did.
And now we’re left with a nice retirement home in a town I struggle to understand. The work at comprehending my fellow Americans is harder than trying to understand locals in that new home I moved to 27 years ago, the one on that other continent. In all honesty, now that I’m retired from that line of work, I still sometimes long to return to that other hemisphere that makes more sense than this one.
We have come home, indeed, but this is not our home.
And so, like the good little missionary I once was, I’ll learn this place. I’ll figure out the people and their values. I’ll learn their likes and dislikes. I’ll do my best to become all things for this group of people so that I can someday carry them closer to the cross. I’ll take on those characteristics that help me to fit in….
…here at home.
WOW, Great last paragraph!
This is often the experience of expats too. Very strange and unnerving.
This is a brilliant post. Leaves me breathless. I have felt this way for many, many years without having ever left as I watch the culture around me becoming more and more alienated from what it was when I was a boy. It isn’t just time and distance that changed you. You can never step in the same river twice.
Jeremy,
Thank you so much for posting this! I identify in many, many ways with what the writer writes here, and I am sure many others do as well. Though I have not had the privilege and honor of retiring on the field, as the writer of this post did, and as I and my wife had hoped and planned to do, I think many of the emotions are the same. After living many years in a different country, and pouring your life and soul into proclaiming the gospel and making disciples in a cultural context different than the one in which you grew up, it is indeed challenging to make the shift and begin to see life and ministry from yet another different, though strangely familiar, cultural perspective. And, yes, many times, because of this, you do at times feel very misunderstood, and a bit out of place.
I am curious, is there any particular reason why you are not able to give us the full name of the writer?
Thank you for your kind words.
I wrote this myself based on the letters and notes we have received from a number of retired missionaries. One in particular was quite helpful, and it was her voice that comes through so clearly here. I pieced together her notes and comments, filling in the gaps with what I understood to be true. I was hoping to capture the pathos, the emotion of what so many returning missionaries encounter and feel.
As for why there is no name here, it is a personal policy of mine to cover identities or hide them behind changed details. I imagine Cal and his wife have neighbors who would object to some of the characterizations here. No sense in making things harder than they have to be. Ultimately, it is not the retirees’ intent to malign their new friends; they’re just frustrated.
I meant to say this earlier…
I apologize for not making source and authorship clearer.
What a wonderful life. I am perplexed that you would retire and live in a place you do not belong. Take your retirement and go back to live where you are comfortable. I was in management and had to relocate. I never felt comfortable till I came back home. Live your golden age where you are most comfortable and serve like you have always served. Don’t waste life as you know it.
Great article, my friend. And ever so true.
Seems like you have been shadowing me this past year. You pretty much nailed how it feels.
“Spot on” is British slang for well done. Ditto to what David said too. I would add a note about PTSD: All that security training and living behind razor wire and gates for many years causes some flash backs here too. Thank you Jeremy
I speak to the gentleman that made the comments that expats have this same reaction. I spent 5 years, nine months, and 1 day (I wasn’t counting LOL) working for a oil company in Yanbu Al-Nawa, Saudi Arabia. I would come home for about 4 weeks each year. Yet when I finally came home to stay the changes were so dramatic. I have been home for over 20 years now and still shake my head at some of the attitudes of people. I can just imagine if I had been there for 27 years, what the adjustment would be like. I found the culture shock was more intense going home rather than going to KSA.
As Believers we should never feel completely at home in this world.
I was going to say pretty much the same thing. It should be a blessing to NOT feel at home here because when we do, our eternal home doesn’t seem like the home we long for.
JEREMY . . .
I hope soon someone reaches out to you and your family to welcome you and make you all feel more ‘at home’.
There is a sadness going ‘back’ to places we have been where we were happy, and now the people who lived there that we loved have passed on, and the house where they lived seems much smaller, and darker, and not at all the same place. Such it was for me, when I visited the house of my grandparents where I spent so many happy days long time ago.
It must be that what made that wonderful house a ‘home’ was love:
the presence of those who loved their family, and the family who loved them back.
Other places change us so that when we return, we return differently. And that’s everything, because a place is a place by virtue of who you are or were there, and not due to the actual surroundings.