Why I'm Not Going Home Next Year

When my kids were little, they used to get so excited about staying at hotels. I admit, I did, too, when I was a kid – and I never understood why my parents didn’t share my feelings. What’s not to be excited about? Eating in a restaurant. Going swimming. Staying up late. As a parent myself, I now understand why we aren’t excited about spending $100 a night for six people to sleep together in one room. But hotel stays are brief. And it usually means we are on vacation, spending fun days together as a family. We can handle it for a few days.

When you visit a place, you understand that it is temporary. There may be things both familiar and unfamiliar, but that is ok. You see the familiar as reassuring and the unfamiliar as new and exciting. And you can handle the unfamiliar because you know it won’t last.

Actually moving overseas is not like a vacation. We aren’t just visiting Thailand. We have a house here (well, it isn’t ours, but we’ve made it our own as best we can). We have work here. We have a church that we love and that has become our community, where our kids go to youth group and we have a small group. To a certain extent, after almost three years, we have settled in.

When we return to the US for our “home assignment,” we will be gone from this place for one full year. This brings so many issues with it. We must pack up all our personal belongings and put them in storage. Thankfully, we don’t have to store our furniture. But who will keep our cat while we are away? Where will we live in the US? We don’t have a house there anymore. Where do you go for one year? Who will take care of the classes we teach here while we are gone? After all, the reason God called us here was to fulfill a need. And what will happen to the Thai language that we have managed to learn after we’ve spent a year surrounded only by English speakers?

There are deeper emotional issues to grapple with as well. When we say good-bye here, some of those good-byes will be permanent, as we have friends who will be moving back to their home countries while we are gone. And after being back in the US for one year, we will say good-bye again – not only to all our friends, families, and supporters, but to our second child, who will remain in the US to go to university. So many good-byes. There is nowhere we can go to escape them; it is just part of the life of an ex-pat. People come and people go. You learn to live and to love while you can, but the good-byes never get easier.

I find the term home assignment an interesting one. As if you can be assigned a home. What is the real meaning of home anyway?

Home is belonging. Home is friends and family. People who understand who you are and where you’ve been and love you anyway.

Home is an expected level of comfort –physically (like a place in which you can completely relax and don’t feel like a guest), mentally (let down your guard, be yourself) and emotionally (a place where you are loved unconditionally, where you belong).

At home, you understand how things work and you are comfortable working within the rules. For lack of a better description, at home you fit in and things feel natural. You don’t feel like you’re going against the grain, or that at your core you are completely different from the world around you.

As I think through the various things that the word home means to me, I realize why neither Thailand nor the US feels like home. Thailand is familiar. I have learned to function well here. I can get the things I need. I can even usually communicate now (praise the Lord!), and when I can’t, I can still figure out what my next step should be. I have a place I can be comfortable with my family, and we have our daily routines. We have made a few friends. But it still does not feel completely like home. There is still a language and culture barrier. Every day that I leave my house, I am confronted with a situation where I think, “I just don’t understand why they do that!” And as a Christian living in a Buddhist nation, I am constantly surrounded by physical proof that I am different in my core beliefs and values.

But the US is not home either. Not anymore. That's not to say that we aren't excited about being there again. Most of the people I love the most live there. But like me, their lives have changed during the time I’ve been away. I think our closest friends still “get us,” to a certain extent. But our lives are now radically different from the lives of people in our old communities. Many of our friends have never moved out of the area where they grew up. They don’t really understand what it is like to move, and certainly can’t understand moving to another country. There are also some real differences between Thailand and the US, like which side of the road you drive on and what the weather is like. So after being away for three years, there is now a little bit of a culture barrier between us and what should be familiar. And the transient nature of deputation during home assignment will make it very difficult to ever settle into community while we are back in the US. 

The real reason I’m not coming home next year is that I’m homeless. I’m in between homes, living the best I can here on earth while I wait for that final, permanent move. My “citizenship is in heaven, and I eagerly await a savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20). That truth has never been more real to me than it has since moving overseas.