by on April 27, 2012
We just said goodbye to our closest family friends here in SE Asia. It was one of those very rare relationships where everyone in the family actually enjoyed each other — the kids, the wives, the husbands. And it was community born of necessity, and desperation, and proximity. We iced Christmas cookies together, we babysat each other’s kids for appointments, we hid Easter eggs, we watched choreographed dances from the girls and cheered and video-recorded like we were watching Broadway. The men brainstormed ministry and the ladies ran a triathalon. We drank a million cups of coffee and quite a few glasses of wine over conversations that mattered, and we tasted what it meant to be known in a very-foreign place.
And, then, our friends took an exciting job at a church in North Carolina. And Tuesday, after virtual yard sales and goodbye dinners and one last lunch at their Favorite Place, we stood in the driveway around a truck piled high with black suitcases, and we said goodbye to people that mean the world to us, again.
And we know what it means to be the ones leaving, and we’ve tasted the being left, too, and I can’t really say which is harder. But I do know that it does a number on your heart, this digging-deep and this tearing-away. This goodbye followed painfully close on the heels of the hello.
When we first arrived here in SE Asia, we were invited by another missionary family over to dinner. I remember standing in the kitchen, with fans blowing the heat into our faces, while the wife offered me my first piece of advice from the field– she told me to lie. When I told her I wasn’t sure how long we would be overseas, she immediately said, “Well, listen, just lie and when people ask you, say four years or more. Otherwise, you won’t ever get asked over for dinner or make friends.”
I gave her a nickname when we left, Bitter Missionary, and vowed never to fall victim to that kind of relational-cynicsim. {Though it was obvious when I first arrived that many others already had.}
But, just a few years in, I get it. I understand more where Bitter Missionary was coming from. Because a heart can only take so many dramatic airport goodbyes before a natural self-protection mechanism creeps in and takes over. And while I’m an adult and have perhaps the capability to cope, I watch my kids’ reactions to the loss of friends, and I cringe a little inside. Because my son told me today that he didn’t have any friends in SE Asia and asked why we just couldn’t “go back to America already, forever.”
We just said goodbye to our closest family friends here in SE Asia. It was one of those very rare relationships where everyone in the family actually enjoyed each other — the kids, the wives, the husbands. And it was community born of necessity, and desperation, and proximity. We iced Christmas cookies together, we babysat each other’s kids for appointments, we hid Easter eggs, we watched choreographed dances from the girls and cheered and video-recorded like we were watching Broadway. The men brainstormed ministry and the ladies ran a triathalon. We drank a million cups of coffee and quite a few glasses of wine over conversations that mattered, and we tasted what it meant to be known in a very-foreign place.
And, then, our friends took an exciting job at a church in North Carolina. And Tuesday, after virtual yard sales and goodbye dinners and one last lunch at their Favorite Place, we stood in the driveway around a truck piled high with black suitcases, and we said goodbye to people that mean the world to us, again.
And we know what it means to be the ones leaving, and we’ve tasted the being left, too, and I can’t really say which is harder. But I do know that it does a number on your heart, this digging-deep and this tearing-away. This goodbye followed painfully close on the heels of the hello.
When we first arrived here in SE Asia, we were invited by another missionary family over to dinner. I remember standing in the kitchen, with fans blowing the heat into our faces, while the wife offered me my first piece of advice from the field– she told me to lie. When I told her I wasn’t sure how long we would be overseas, she immediately said, “Well, listen, just lie and when people ask you, say four years or more. Otherwise, you won’t ever get asked over for dinner or make friends.”
I gave her a nickname when we left, Bitter Missionary, and vowed never to fall victim to that kind of relational-cynicsim. {Though it was obvious when I first arrived that many others already had.}
But, just a few years in, I get it. I understand more where Bitter Missionary was coming from. Because a heart can only take so many dramatic airport goodbyes before a natural self-protection mechanism creeps in and takes over. And while I’m an adult and have perhaps the capability to cope, I watch my kids’ reactions to the loss of friends, and I cringe a little inside. Because my son told me today that he didn’t have any friends in SE Asia and asked why we just couldn’t “go back to America already, forever.”
We have some close friends
who now live in another city in SE Asia who’ve helped me to see the way
through the brevity of many missionary relationships {I would assume
similar to friendships in the military, as well.} The husband grew up
here as a missionary kid himself, and he told us that his parents used
to say to him about the frequent changing of friendships, “The
relationship is always worth the goodbye.”
The relationship is always worth the goodbye.
And I am finding this statement to be deeply, deeply true. I look back over the year we did life with our friends the Stowells, and I don’t have enough fingers to count the gifts that their friendships provided to each member of our family. It was rich, to say the least. And while the tears were hard and the gap they leave is large, the relationship proved every bit worth the goodbye.
And while maybe I would prefer community
that has deep roots like the oak tree, maybe the community I’m building
is more that of an Aspen– more shallow and quick growing, perhaps, but
strong nonetheless because of it’s connection with so, so many other trees,
spread out as they may be.
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Have you said any hard goodbyes lately?
And if you’ve said a lot of them, do you struggle with a tendency to not
invest in relationships with people because of the past, or because
they might not be around for very long?
Original post by http://www.lauraleighparker.com/2012/04/goodbyes-missionary/
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