staying well – A Life Overseas |

When You Want to Want to Stay Longer

When living overseas, sometimes there’s no doubt that you need to leave. A denied visa, a medical emergency, a government coup, a burn-out, an unresolvable conflict.

Sometimes there’s no doubt you want to stay. You’ve adapted; you’ve found community, ministry, purpose, and most of the time, you’re loving life.

But what about when you think you should stay, but you really don’t want to?

When the need is great, and right now, you’re the best person to fill it. When you’ve received affirmation from local believers and leadership from home that you are a good fit for your role. When you are seeing fruit–or you can almost see it, just over the horizon.

But you are weary of this life. You are sick and tired of the long lines at government offices, of bugs in your kitchen drawers, of being misunderstood (again). The pollution aggravates your daughter’s asthma, and it takes you five hours to run one errand, and suddenly the price of milk doubles over night. Again.

And your old life is looking pretty great. Your friends’ lives on Instagram are looking even better.

You don’t really want to stay. But you’re pretty sure you should. You want to want to stay. How do you get there?

Maybe sometimes you just need a vacation. Or some counseling. Maybe you need to consider a new neighborhood. Maybe you just need to bite the bullet and buy that air conditioner.

But after fifteen years living overseas, do you want to know what has kept me here longer? Changing my perspective from This is an experience to This is my life.

What’s the difference?

An experience is temporary. It’s something that you check off your bucket list before going back to your “normal” life. You’re likely to expect fun and adventure. You’re likely to have high expectations of what you’re going to get out of it, and lower lows when you don’t.

Since an experience has a defined beginning and end, you also aren’t necessarily looking for the normal rhythms of work and rest. You might be thinking that you need to pack in as much as you can because you know your time is limited. And when you’re looking at your time overseas as an experience, when times get hard, you just dig in your heels and endure it. (Buy an air conditioner? Pish! I’m here to be tough.) The end is always in sight, and you are counting the days till it’s over.

When it comes time to decide if you should stay longer, it’s not even a consideration. The experience is over; so why should you stay? Your sights are already set on home; they have been for a long time. Staying longer seems unfathomable.

But when you enter your time overseas with the mindset that This is my life, then there is no end in sight. You realize that adaptation is key. Of course, this does not mean that you try to recreate your life back home. But it does mean that you are actively looking for that “new normal.” When times get tough, you aren’t counting the days until it’s over. Instead, you’re thinking about how you can make this work. How you can adapt. How you can either change your circumstances or change your perspective so that you aren’t utterly miserable all of the time.

What does this tangibly look like? Put pictures up on your walls. Plant a garden. Spend the extra money to get the couch you love, instead of someone’s old ugly hand-me-down. These are little things, but can help significantly with your mindset. Slow down. Watch TV sometimes. Don’t fret over “wasted” time learning language and culture, chomping at the bit to get your “real” ministry started. Watch. Wait. Listen. Learn. When the power goes out or you get three flat tires in a week, pay attention to your thinking. Are you telling yourself, “Just a few more months and this will be over,” or rather “How can I learn to live this way?”

You want to want to stay? Let me tell you something I’ve learned about contentment in this overseas life: The more you think about leaving, the more you will want to leave. The more you resolve yourself to stay, the more content you will be.

And one more thing: There will always be a reason to leave if you are looking for it. Always. If you want a reason, you will find it. So here’s my challenge: Instead of just asking yourself, Do I want to leave?, consider asking yourself, Is there a good reason why I shouldn’t stay longer?

Full disclosure: My family is in that place right now, asking ourselves that question. I realize that finding the answer is not simple, because it can be easy to mingle God’s calling with our own desires. Knowing when has been “long enough” can often become more complicated the longer you stay….because the experience has become life! That’s what’s kept us here fifteen years, and the depth of our friendships, the wealth of what we have learned, and the multiplying impact of ministry have made all of these years more than worth it. I pray it will be for you too.

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.

8 Ways for Expats Who Stay to Stay Well

Before you move abroad there are orientation meetings and cross cultural trainings and seminars and books to read and lists to check off and personality tests to pass and character examinations.

When you decide it is time to repatriate back to the ‘home country’ there are debriefs and readjustment seminars and repatriating coaches and Third Culture Kid conferences and if there aren’t, there probably should be, more personality tests to pass because the person coming back is not the same person who left.

But when you stay…and stay…and stay…there’s, um, well…there’s life. Daily cross-cultural, personality transforming, character challenging, mundane life.

The honeymoon stage of being an expatriate and the down in the dumps stage of culture shock have passed. The dreaming of a new thing and planning for the next adventure and anxiety, grief, and hope of moving on haven’t yet arrived. There’s just…today. And the next day. And the next. And all around those of us who stay are those of us who come and go and come and go and the list of people we’ve known and loved (or hated) over the years grows oh.so.long.

And the heart of a stayer can grow oh.so.cold. Immune to the excitement of the newbie, hardened to the sorrow of saying goodbye. And, even more insidious, indifferent to the peaceful pleasure of staying.

At one point, I was a comer. One day in the future, I will be a leaver. But for the past twelve years, I have been a stayer. And I’ve passed through all the feelings: joy at new friends, sorrow at goodbyes, anger at goodbyes, self righteous judgment of newbies, carelessness about my current circumstances, delight in my situation. It isn’t easy to stay well and to stay healthy emotionally, while staying.

How can stayers stay well?

Love the ones you’re with. Most likely, you are not the only long-term stayer where you live. You might not have a lot of options and the people around you might not be people you’d naturally gravitate toward in another situation. Fine. Love them well anyway. Think of them like family, people you are committed to through thick and thin. People who remember your kids when they were in diapers, families with children you have loved from preschool until university. These long-term relationships are invaluable. We need people to reminisce with, to hold shared memories with, people who know us well enough that they can call out our weaknesses and recognize our strengths.

Keep exploring. Keep learning. You’ve been here a long time, you actually know things now, not like you ‘knew’ things when you first arrived. But don’t let that stymy your learning. There is always a new restaurant, a new vocabulary word, a new campsite, a new experience. Stay curious, stay engaged. Go deep.

Be you. Maybe you thought that when you moved abroad you would have to give up what you love. Give up running, baking, dancing, photography, playing piano. You couldn’t fit the saxophone in your luggage. The city is too conservative for female runners. There are no dance studios. But if you intend to stay well, for more than a year or two, you must find a way to continue doing what you find life-giving. Of course, you’ll have to be flexible. Run in longer clothes, run on a treadmill, run in a group. Start a dance studio, dance in your kitchen. Learn new recipes with local ingredients. You can still be you, you just have to adjust and be creative. But it is imperative that you find ways to engage the inner, authentic parts of who you are.

Be honest about the hard things. It is hard to say goodbye and hello and goodbye and hello. It is hard to know a culture well enough that you see darkness, to have friendships that are strong enough that you are let into brokenness. Its hard to admit to your own brokenness and loneliness and struggles. But have a trusted few, or even one, with whom you can be utterly honest. But, part b) be wise about who you share those hard things with. Newbies might not be ready for your emotional dump. A peripheral, though staying, friend might not be able to handle it either. Be thoughtful, don’t throw your pearls to swine.

Say hello well. Be open to the newbies. You just might find a stayer. Or, you might find someone who goes out again in two years but those two years of friendship might be the saving grace you need. Invite people to dinner or to the beach, be willing to answer questions if someone seeks your hard-earned expertise, be open to the fresh ideas of a newbie. There are treasures here, too.

Say goodbye well. The pain of being left is often masked by the sorrow and excitement of those who are leaving. Let yourself be sad for a while. Don’t make empty promises of keeping in touch. I cannot keep in touch with all those who have left, not in a regular, meaningful way. And I shouldn’t. I need to engage and be where I am. So throw the going away party, enjoy the inherited leftovers, buy something at the leaving sale, take photos, honor your friendship, and then let them go. But remember people by telling stories, keep in touch through your memories and shared legacy.

Help your kids say goodbye well. Don’t let them ignore the goodbye but don’t force something either, or expect all your children to respond the same way. Give them words to express what they feel. Help them honor the friendship. My kids make photo pages of the friends who have left. They give the photo pages to the friend but they make copies and keep one for themselves.

Say hey there well. Become friends with locals. They are less likely to leave and more likely to usher you into the local culture. They are people who knew you when you couldn’t even say, ‘hey there.’ And if they have stuck by you all these years, that is a friendship to cherish.

What other tips would you offer stayers? What has helped you stay well?