Disconnect...

Call.
Prayer.
Discernment.
Decision.
Action.

Disconnect
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I feel like I should write a book for young people who are considering moving overseas. A book that goes through what happens when you move overseas. The pits and pitfalls that you don’t realize. The real sacrifices you make.

When you feel the call to go, you pray hard about whether or not it’s right, whether or not you’re ready, whether you have the faith to make the jump… you pray for God to provide the strength and be the hitching post for you to tie yourself to.
Once you make the decision to go, and then GO, there are worlds of things you realize. You know from the beginning that you are leaving your family. You’re leaving your home. You’re leaving your comfort. Sometimes you are leaving your language. You are leaving your friends. You are leaving ‘normal’ food. You are leaving life as you know it.

But did you know that you are leaving funerals? Weddings? Births? Baptisms? You are leaving the dinner out with friends after a bad day. You are leaving the comfort food you run to when something bad happens. You are leaving the park you go to for quiet time. You are leaving the little, every day things that make your life what it is.

However, you also get to make a new life. You make new friends, grow to love new places, new foods, and find different ways of coping with things. You adapt to a whole new society and become fully aware of things you neglected at home. You realize home is not really home; that just as Jesus said, you are a stranger in your own town.

As you fully put yourself into your new life, not being able to isolate yourself from your current mission to look back on the past, you also lose your old life. Everything has changed. When you return for visits, nothing is as it was. You, especially, have changed in ways that others can’t understand. You have assimilated into a culture so different and learned so many different things that you just can’t fit back in to ‘home’.

I experienced some of this last year when I went home. I was picked up at the airport and was taken to my grandmother’s. I woke later that day to her making lunch for me. An American lunch! A lunch complete with meat from a bag, cooked in an electric oven, and on glass plates with nice silver ware and conversations completely in English. There was no maid to wash the dishes later. There was no watchman knocking on the door to make sure everything was alright. I was back in the land of the driving, too! Who would have thought I could drive after a year of nothing!

It was so different being back. Everyone spoke of how I’d ‘grown up’, ‘matured’. I was different. I sat around with family and friends and had loads to speak of, but had no way of communicating what I was talking about. A place called The Budge was a foreign concept to them. Explaining how I grocery shopped was a task. Explaining the Sunday Market was even worse. I was the freak in the sideshow. “Well, that sure is different” was said a lot. But how do you really explain it all? Explain living in a place where life is so different? How do I begin to tell them what is going on?
It is the same in reverse in some ways. So much changes in such a short amount of time, that people have a hard time catching YOU up on everything. So-and-so moved from once house to another, someone else got married and had a kid, another person from town died… you drive familiar streets and notice that everything you’ve been remembering is not the same: parking lots have grown bigger, new cars are on the street, and restaurants have popped up in unlikely places, and the new hot spot in town is somewhere you have never heard of.

As I live here longer and longer the changes become more and more apparent to me. I cannot even begin to explain my life here to people that have no concept of life outside America. No matter how hard you try to stay connected, things change and people drift. E-mails become less. Phone calls are non-existent. So much goes on in everyone’s life that remembering people who aren’t around becomes difficult.
And, even as I type this, I know that this isn’t true for everyone. I know people who have lived overseas for decades whose parents still call THEM once a week. It’s not my friend’s responsibility to think about the time difference, to think about calling rates, and what’s going on in the states and then make a phone call. Her parents call HER. On a regular basis. It’s comforting to know that some people are not forgotten. That connection CAN be kept no matter how long it’s been since seeing each other.

There are sacrifices you make that you don’t even realize when you leave. Or, maybe you have thought of them, but they don’t really hit until they happen.

I am grateful for the family that I have developed here. The people I have grown close to. The people that are by my side and love me and comfort me when I need it.
I miss my family at home, but understand that things change and I am not there. I am not part of their lives like I once was. Even if I want to be. One day I’ll be back, but for now, that is how it is. I can’t change how other people act. I can only change what I do, and I will continue trying to stay in touch, even if at times I feel it’s not worth it.

::sigh::