The
story of life, friends, a little love, and a God who carries me through.
I'd
like if you take a journey with me to a place I call home
and experience a little something I call 'family'.
**In case you're wondering, we
always look like this. Trust me, my class is the best one out there. The good,
the bad, the sane and the senile - we're all here, happy and unashamed. We took
this on our Senior Retreat on the shores of an uninhabited island straight out
of a National Geographic magazine. Be jealous my friends, Papua New Guinea is
the most beautiful country in the world.
Home is usually defined through the
confines of a building. We take our first steps as a child in the safe haven of
our home, we take our boyfriend or girlfriend home to
meet our parents for the first time, we go back home after a
long day of work. This is normal.
Family is usually defined by direct,
blood relation. Your mom, your pop, your sisters and brothers are the first
people you learn to love based on your differences and supposed hatred toward
each other. You bond with your family in a way rare to the outside world. But
if a family's doing the right things and living as a household under God, a
family's love is unbreakable. This is the typical picture of a family- live,
pray, love, family.
But spending the past three years as
a Missionary Kid really shakes things up when it comes to the crucial questions
like who am I? and where do I belong? I no
longer view my house in the United States as my home. My dad had made
incredible renovations to make the simple modular house into a spectacular home
for the time - we lived in it for 11 years. And to say that I no longer view
that place as my home is not saying I do not still cherish the memories, still
learn from my expediences and love the people I have met. I love my
friends in the States, I miss them desperately and I can't wait until I see
them in a few short months. I simple do not view the building I lived in for 11 years as my home anymore. But home for me, is something different
entirely.
I believe that my home is wherever
family is.
You can take this several different
ways:
1. Wherever my actual, blood-related
family reside my home will as well
2. the Body of Christ
3. The deep relationships that are
sometimes forged through fire are just as much family as my blood brothers and
sisters. Wherever they go, wherever they are, all over the world - that is my
home.
If you couldn't tell, I lean toward
the third option. I'm not saying that the above two are wrong, because they're
not. They are essential and just as full of love as the last. But number 3 gives
me a different kind of hope I believe only people who live overseas can
understand. I hope you can grasp the love I feel for these people when I
say the senior class of UISSC is like a second family to me. You
don't get that in the States. You just don't.
How incredibly blessed I am.
So often in the missions field,
friends leave you seemingly all alone. In all honesty, I can't speak for this
because I have been blessed to be in a class whose parents planned their
furloughs so they wouldn't have to leave their sophomore, junior or senior
years. But there are other things that can take a family way in a matter of
days, leaving the missions field a very uncertain place. Life is full
of unpredictability here. (But I do have had a very special friend
leave last year from a grade below me and she is what makes this blog a
little more credible.)
Having a friend in Ukarumpa is
something that exceeds many surface-level friendships in the States.
Wait! Don't kill me yet for I fear I have just overstepped my bounds.
What I mean to say is to have a friend here is to have a relationship
for life. People move and people leave so frequently that MK's and
missionaries alike forge deep friendships at sometimes record speeds (I'm
talking in general terms, of course. There are people who don't, but for the
sake of my point, pretend there aren't) and these fast friends can last a
lifetime. But sometimes, especially in the month of June for Ukarumpa families,
life is rather dull when friends leave to their home-countries.
But there is a hope among this chaos
- a hope that makes saying goodbye worth it. Now, all over the world (I'm not
kidding: Papua New Guinea, South Korea, Finland, Australia, Germany, Romania,
China, Japan. They really are everywhere), I have friends for life. That is a
very special feeling for a person like me, just about 2 months away from
climbing into a plane that will take me away from my home and into a place that
is everything but completely foreign to me, knowing that I will have
opportunities to see many of them again. Most of my class is likely attending
US colleges - which is even more encouraging - but it's also a cool concept
knowing that I really do have family all across the
globe.
I have cried with many of the guys
and the girls in my class as we have faced both similar and divergent burdens
and trials throughout the years. Especially lately. We have come closer than
ever before knowing that the life we're living now will soon come to a close as
a new chapter unfolds. have come to love like I have never loved
before.
All I want to say now is thank
you. Thank you for accepting me and thank you for all the memories. You
will always have a place in my heart...always.
We are united. Under one God, we
will live forever in a place where there are no more goodbyes.
From,
-M
Don't you know that you yourselves
are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in your midst?
1 Corinthians 3:16
No comments:
Post a Comment