adjustment – A Life Overseas |

Embracing Life From the Second Row

I was not just upset; I was upset with myself for being upset.

After years of “maybe someday,” I had finally auditioned for worship choir. Kick your thoughts of robes and high sopranos to the curb. This group was cool.

I stepped onto the risers that first Sunday, trembly with nerves. My heart was full of prayers to open the heavens. My head was running harmonies, timing changes, and bridge lyrics. My pride, the tricky beast, was bumped by my spot in the second row.

Until that moment, I hadn’t known how much I wanted to be seen.

The leadership wisely put anchor people in the most visible places. When the spiritual climate of a thousand is at stake, holiness trumps height. My 5’2″ stature had always placed me front, if not also center. This group was different, arranged by experience and anointing.

The veterans in front of me topped my height by inches, even with the riser’s help. I could still open the heavens—through the small window between two heads and their nearly touching shoulders. My expectations had been widescreen. Bump.

How could my compass be so stuck on me when I was there specifically to point heavenward? I muscled my attitude back in line with devotion and invited the Lord’s presence into the morning.

It was glorious.

Moving to our mission country provided a similar bump to second row. We were shocked to hear children must be 18 years old to be left unattended. Our uber-responsible, babysitting-aged daughter could not legally watch her younger brothers here. A family four houses down was reported to child protective services for the latchkey schedule of their son. Our neighbor had to choose between employment and motherhood.

My window to serve went from panoramic to porthole.

Gently, the Lord drew me back from widescreen expectations of work projects alongside teams and cradling each child at the home. My ministry GPS reconfigured, abandoning the scenic route but not the destination. I point heavenward through food and words shared, prayers on my balcony, and databases current with ways to connect. I wrestle our daily routine in line with devotion through the frame of homeschooling and cross-cultural living.

I have learned anew the simple beauty of well-sung backup harmony.

It’s still glorious.

I will probably always want to be seen. More than I like to admit. Yet, this is holy ground here in the second row. The heavens are open.

Have you ever spent time in the second row? What was your experience like?

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Kris Gnuse is a living testament that the Lord gently leads those who have young. In 2013, she said “I will,” to the Lord’s call for their family of five: to serve at a transitional children’s home in Costa Rica. In the crossroads of hosting short term mission teams and loving little ones who weren’t safe at home, she has a stand offering cups of cold water. You can follow her journey at www.thegoodnewsfamily.com

Your Short-Term Trips Have Not Prepared You For Long-Term Missions

I can still remember the random thoughts that shot through my head during my first couple of weeks as an adult long-term missionary. Wait, what? There’s nothing planned for us today? So what are we supposed to do? Hey, when is someone going to take us souvenir shopping? I was really looking forward to that! Why is no one telling me what to do with the trash? What am I supposed to do with it? Why is no one telling me what to do about anything?

I caught myself many times. No, Amy, you live here now. This is not a short-term trip. I knew that, of course, especially since I had been an MK. But it was weird how my short-term trips had programmed my brain with certain expectations.

This is not a post about the good or the bad of short-term missions (STM), or how to do them well. This is a post about the limits of STM trips as preparation for long-term missions.

These days, just about every long-term missionary has been on at least one STM. Of course, many long-term missionaries choose that life because of a short-term trip—which is a wonderful thing indeed. But what is often not discussed is how different long-term missions is compared to short-term trips. And sometimes, those misplaced expectations can actually make a long-term missionary’s transition even harder.

So if you are headed for long-term missions after a series of short trips, what differences should you expect? Here are four things to consider.

1. No one is going to hold your hand. STM trips, when done well, are carefully controlled. Your entire schedule, down to when and what you will eat, when and where you will sleep, and how you will spend all of your time, have been decided for you. You might not even get to handle local money yourself.

So when you arrive on the ground as a long-term missionary, it might come as a shock that you will be more or less on your own. If you’re lucky, there might be a few missionaries who will show you around and get you oriented. But they will be busy, and you will find yourself thrown in the deep end a lot sooner than you wanted. It might be scary and overwhelming and not nearly as fun as your short-term trip.

2. Daily life is not all ministry; in fact, most of it isn’t. My husband remembers his first STM trip when he was in college, and the shock he experienced when he realized that his host missionaries not only watched television regularly, but they had cable. What? Missionaries need rest? On STM trips, you might joyfully work 12-hour days and fall into your sleeping bag at night feeling smugly satisfied with all you accomplished.

But as a long-term missionary, you might waste 5 hours driving all over town, looking for the right-sized lightbulb. Or you might spend all day in the immigration line. You can go whole days where all your time is consumed by figuring out how to just live, and you think, Ministry? What’s that? On top of that, you’ll soon discover that burn out comes really quickly if you don’t allow some downtime into your life. Even if that means getting cable.

3. True results take a long, long, long (long!) time. When you went on that STM trip, you may have been ecstatic to see the kids who raised their hand at the VBS. One of the best moments of your life might have been when the poor family stepped into the new home you built for them. And you will never forget the party that broke out in the village when they witnessed the well you paid for. But a few days later, you got on a plane and left. You weren’t there to notice that the VBS kids never showed up at church again. You didn’t see the poor family get pushed out of their brand new home by an older relative. Six months after the well was built, you weren’t there to see it broken and rusting.

But when you sign up for long-term service, those disappointments become your reality. And if you’re expecting quick, easy, fabulous success stories, you’re not going to last very long in your new country. You’ve got to start your new life with your teeth clenched in determination, with lots of grit, and humble, long-term perseverance.

4. Going home will be a whole lot harder. Anyone who has gone on an STM trip will secretly admit that the best part is coming home. You’ve got a great couple of weeks behind you. You eagerly discuss with your teammates which fast-food restaurant you will go to first when you get home. Your church and friends and family are bursting with questions and praise and eyes full of wonder at your stories. And when all the excitement dies down, you settle back comfortably into your old life.

Except, coming home after two or three years looks nothing like coming home after two or three weeks. Your friends have moved on with their lives. You are a different person—you feel different, and your friends treat you differently. They don’t know what to ask you and you struggle to relate to each other. You may find that the home you dreamed about now feels confusing and disorienting.

One of the keys to adjusting to a new culture is holding loosely to your expectations. Unfortunately, STM trips can actually make that worse by creating a false picture of what your new life will look like. I still love short-term missions trips when they are done well, but it’s important to understand their limits in preparing you for long-term service. Don’t be surprised if you need to un-learn some of what they taught you.

The Normal Fallacy

I stopped believing in ‘normal’ a long time ago and I can pinpoint the moment when the loss of that belief crystalized for me. I was in Minnesota, sitting in a hot tub at my parents’ home. Friends and family were eating brats and hot dogs, playing raucous games of spoons, enjoying the view of the lake and grass and oak trees. Someone asked me, “What is different about your life in Djibouti from life here?”

I froze.

Uh…hot tub? Brats? Hot dog? Spoon games? Lakes? Grass? Oak trees? Family? Where should I start?

What is different? Nothing. My kids go to school, I grocery shop, I pray, I cook, I visit friends, my husband and I go for walks.

What is different? Everything. My kids go to French school and now boarding school. I shop at three stores, the market, the bread delivery man, the dukaan across the street, and the vegetable stall down the block. I pray for people I never would have known before, challenges I never could have fathomed before. I cook everything from bread to barbecue sauce from scratch. I visit friends and speak multiple different languages, sometimes while wearing a headscarf or abaya. My husband and I go for walks but we don’t touch and we dodge goats, camels, and kids who want to follow us.

This all feels normal now.

It wouldn’t feel normal to a freshly-arrived person.

Minnesota sort of feels normal but also doesn’t in any way feel normal. It feels like a nostalgic normal.

Looking at my Djibouti life from a Minnesotan perspective, this is what I conclude:

It is not normal to go into a grocery store, rip open a box of ice cream bars, and only purchase one.
It is not normal to turn left from the right hand lane.
It is not normal to pick worms out of flour.
It is not normal to kill tweny-seven cockroaches in one morning in one room.
It is not normal for white laundry to come out clean but gray, because of the water.
It is not normal to say, “I feel cold,” and “What a beautiful day,” when the sky is thick with clouds and the temperature drops to 95.
It is not normal to eat lunch as a family every single day and to almost never eat dinner as a family.
It is not normal to hear “Je vais au suuqa pour eegayaa les shiids” or to say it, and to totally understand it. (This is what we call Fromali – a French-Somali hybrid that people often slip into here).
It is not normal for candles to melt when they are not near a flame.
It is not normal to buy baguettes from a green wooden cart.

Oh wait a second. These things are entirely normal. They are my normal. They just aren’t your normal. They didn’t used to be my normal but they were always somebody’s normal.

So I decided, normal is a fallacy.

Normal is a lie we’ve chosen to believe because then we can judge and categorize and feel good (or bad) about ourselves. We can feel comfortable or uncomfortable, like we fit in or are completely out of place. Standards of living, clothing styles, church service preferences, driving habits, interpersonal interactions…the list could go on and on of all the things we categorize as normal when they are done the way we are used to them being done.

But the thing is, this list of 10 things I wrote? Those are all ‘normal.’ They always have been, probably always will be, for thousands and thousands of people. One of the first things that needs to go when expatriates face the culture stripping shock of moving abroad is an insistence that things be ‘normal.’

How do we do that? First, toss the word. Then, open yourself to new ways of doing life. Don’t expect things, life, people to be the way you are used to. Create a space for your own normal and your family’s own normal but recognize that this normal is limited to you and your family. Be flexible to see, welcome, and celebrate another person’s normal.

Do you think normal is a fallacy? What are some new ‘normals’ in your expat life that you hadn’t anticipated?