Homesickness.

Homesickness is for wusses.

 

Pining for a childhood pillow, wistfully dreaming of Mama’s home-cooked lasagna and longingly yearning for the material comforts of city life, “homesick” paints the ultimate picture of ineffectuality and spinelessness. After all, it is the spirited backpacker, the aloof nomad, and the undaunted pilgrim who earn their badge of honor.

 

Missionaries, being soldiers, are not allowed to be homesick.

 

After all, sent out into the world for noble causes, shouldn’t they be filled with an awe-inspiring, altruistic sense of purpose of transforming lives, preaching the gospel and building latrines? Being away from home forms the very essence of the job scope of a missionary. If one can’t even endure that, it is doubtful if he or she was ever called to the job in the first place.

 

Homesickness is for wusses. It weeds out the strong from the weak. And if you can’t take it, go home.

 

Or is it, really?

 

Long-term missionaries had warned us to plan for holidays in advance. Christmas, Chinese New Year and other festivities were occasions that the pang of homesickness hit hardest, especially if one has been used to spending special occasions over gatherings, cast in stone by tradition. “It’s normal,” they had told us, “and it’ll pass. But plan for them in advance, as you would before an announced, oncoming earthquake.”

 

But what I did not expect was how it hit us with no meteorological predictability, and in ways we cared not to admit.

 

In our first four months, two of our pastors and my professor from medical school dropped in to visit, amidst their own planned activities in Africa. Our visitors brought fond memories of home with them- medication with familiar labels, cards from loved ones, thoughtful monetary gifts, and Cliff’s favorite maple syrup, filling up the hole of nostalgia time had unknowingly bore into our hearts. Their leaving, however, only eked out more of the gnawing hole, leaving us yearning, longing and missing home more than ever. Days of sullenness following their departure ensued.

 

Our easy laughter with them reminded us how few friends we had here and how long it had been since we had the company and ease of a familiar community; their gifts triggered wistful memories of places and people; their eventual departure left a shameful, bitter aftertaste after stirring up unwanted feelings of envy, that they could return home after a brief, heroic journey to a third-world country but we could not.

 

It was as if tasting a little comfort through them, only whetted our appetite for more, exacerbating the long-endured hunger for the savor of home.

 

We would do just fine, I thought. After all, I had grown up being a frequent traveler myself, going solo on nearly twenty mission trips all around the world on my own. Once, I had spent Chinese New Year alone in Nepal. I would survive here with my husband. It was another long-term missionary who jolted my smugness back to reality, “You need to spend a full year away from home, experiencing all the ups and downs through birthdays, traditional festivities, important family gatherings and missed weddings, before you can call your new home, Home.”

 

It shocked me, that on the weekend leading up to our second wedding anniversary, an occasion meant for two anyway, the virus of homesickness sent my body into a fever of frustration and chills of loneliness. Photos of the friends who made our wedding possible made me realize how far I was away from them; not knowing how to celebrate a romantic occasion in a foreign land of dirt and dust made me miss the familiar streets of glitz and gold lining our Singapore city; online invites to various friends’ wedding made me realize how absent I was, which included missing the opportunity of being my best friend’s maid-of-honor, as she had been mine. Pensive nostalgia sent my immune system into overdrive, manifesting itself in symptoms of anxious and obsessive email, facebook and text message-checking, wondering if anyone remembered this day which meant something to us.

 

Every missionary knows, that worse than homesickness, is the fear of being forgotten.

 

It was then that I remembered that while Jesus was on earth, He too, was far away from home. For thirty-three years, He left the heavenly, kingly comforts of His sanctuary to abide with earthly, ungrateful mortals who spat on, dishonored and then crucified Him. Surely He missed home, surely it was better to leave the group of thankless traitors to return to His glorious, celestial throne which befitted His status.

 

But He did not. On earth He stayed, to fulfill the purpose He had been called to, even though He had been crushed, humiliated and persecuted on every side. In His anguish for what was to come, He cried out, “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.” (Luke 22:42) He stayed on, to accomplish the task set before Him, to obey His Father’s will. Not once did He allow His homesickness to overtake Him, because He knew His purpose, and He knew He was not forgotten by His Father who loved Him.

 

As he has done, so must we, too.

 

For it is not our human pluck, carnal bravura or fleshly fortitude that shall keep us in a land, miles from home, continually serving a people who may mock our serving, but the crucified obedience to our Lord’s call and His quiet, lively Spirit of grace working in us that shall keep us faithful to the very end.

 

We may be forgotten by some back home, but not by our Father in our heavenly Home, who awaits us with open arms at our Final Homecoming, celebrating our obedience and faithfulness to His call.

 

And in this new land where God’s family abides, it is only a matter of time before we find ourselves right at home with our new brothers and sisters. As a Ugandan sister told us on the eve of our wedding anniversary, over a home-cooked meal shared with 13 people squeezed in a one-room home, “You can call and visit us anytime, even just for chat, because you are our family, too.”

 

 

 “ … They saw it way off in the distance, waved their greeting,

and accepted the fact that they were transients in this world.

People who live this way make it plain that they are looking for their true home.

If they were homesick for the old country,

they could have gone back any time they wanted.

But they were after a far better country than that- heaven country.

You can see why God is so proud of them,

and has a City waiting for them.

–        Hebrews 11:14-16 (The Message version)