You Can Never Go Home and That’s OK  

My last blog was based on the last district council I attended prior to leaving the US.  I was sitting next to Dee, who is now with the Lord, but we were about the same age and at a table full of overseas workers.  A couple, who seemed elderly to me at the time, though likely would look much younger to me now, were seated nearby and were to be honored that night for their many years of service.

Being 30 and naïve, I asked how they felt about “returning home”.

“You can never go home again”, replied the husband with what looked to be basset hound eyes, but totally sincere.

I turned to Dee and said, “Chipper little couple aren’t they” and her eyes widened, and we smiled and carried on.

Thirty-six years later I can say with absolute certainty that you can never go home again.  Here’s the thing:

The culture of your homeland is absolutely nothing like you imagine it to be.  Furloughs consist of running frantically around from family to family and church to church and you really have no idea how much things have changed.  You notice things but are not there long enough to really understand that the national mindset is different than you think. I do not ‘intuit’ the mindset of my home country, nor even, often, of my friends.

People at this age in life have a lot of family going on. Their kids grew up and got married and had other kids and we haven’t the energy we once had.  One friend said to me, “I pictured retirement as a chance to unwind. Incredibly, I am a full-time babysitter”.  Other friends, who are in time warps because of disabled children, or raising their grandchildren, are oddly more like me, because their life progression has kept them from moving along at the same pace as the rest of the world.

But even with our friends, and even with our families, we missed the years of shared memories that come with being able to see one another. We no longer have a relationship with the members of the church which sent us out.  The demographic of the church has changed. No one knows who you are, and you don’t know them.  The church family that once was the backbone of your support, has moved on either to Glory, Florida, or another church closer to their kids or assisted living facility.

We have developed odd habits, whether we realize it or not.  In a European context, I am a notorious under-reactor. I tell that to anyone coming to work with me. “If it stresses you out, you need to tell me flat out because I am not going to intuitively know”. If something is not on fire, being fired up, in flames, or bleeding, I tend to triage it a bit lower than most. My take on most things is if people get enough sleep and some good ice cream and the moon quarters, everything will be OK.  I don’t panic easily, which is not a trait in my homeland anymore.

I learned that I am terrible, truly terrible, at “code switching” which is a complicated way to say, “Please do not use more than one language with me in the same sentence” because I genuinely cannot understand you. This is apparently very common, and I had observed it in friends before I realized how often I must have seemed rude by saying, “What?” to someone who tried to insert English in a friendly way in a sentence.  When I return to my home country, if you want to speak another language to me, please tell me so I change gears.

We have never owned a home. I have zero skills in buying one. I do not understand Medigap insurance.  I find US politics confusing and dislike it intensely. I have also learned that disliking politics is considered a hate crime as one is obliged to agree with whoever one is talking to at any given time.  People are fragile. If they like broccoli and you do not they might need space because you are threatening to them because you have different vegetable preferences. 

Our children do not live in the same country as that to which we shall return.  We need to be independent as long as we can be lest we burden anyone.  We need to be useful as long as we can, because so long as we have breath in our body, God has a purpose for us on this earth.

And all of this is good. 

I realize it didn’t sound so good the way I said it, because I hate being lonely.  But years ago we set our face to a better city and a better country, “One whose Builder and Maker is God”.  That is when we will be home again. From now, till then, we are pilgrims and strangers and sojourners, which is exactly what we were called to be.