This week’s team bible study focused around the Third Culture Kid (google it!) book and the meaning and impact of transition on our lives. Jesus was the original third culture kid, as us missionaries are fond of remembering, and the people of Bible times experienced many transitions. The book describes transition as : a passage from one place, subject or state to another. Those who leave must transition, those who are left behind transition too.
The life of a missionary is always spectacularly full of transition and change. Yet for us on the Bundibugyo team life has felt even fuller than usual of change, of loss, of mourning. Our hearts are heavy, our spirits close to breaking in some ways.
For me, asking the philosophical question “is transition normal or a broken part of this broken world?” is important. How do I react to the grief of loss after loss. To the immersion in the knowledge that even as I enter ministry here there is no avoiding that unmistakably I must someday leave. How do I plunge my heart into this place, these people, while knowing that it likely will never be my permanent home. How do I say hello to new people with love, grace and openness while letting go of others all the time. How do I help my children weather this.
We are used to frequent moves as a Navy family but the missionary life is something altogether different. A lifestyle not only of change but of attachment and tearing away. We decided as a group, that change is a normal part of an abnormal world that change itself is healthy but in this world it is inextricably linked with brokenness, sadness, pain. We asked Jesus to enter this pain with us; His experience was really remarkably similar. He entered a foreign place to love a foreign people with all his heart and soul, he was hurt and rejected, broken and pierced by the ones He came to love, and ultimately he left the place to which He came. It was never His home. We look to things eternal, thankful that we too are eternal beings who will live to see the new heaven and the new earth.