Unrealistic Expectations

Unrealistic expectations regarding my upcoming home assignment. Do I have them? I'm not sure. I hope not, but I guess I won't really know until I get back and spend a little time with family and friends. One of my supporters sent me an article today that originally appeared in Women of the Harvest magazine. Here are a few paragraphs from it:

"Because we are the ones on foreign soil, struggling with a new culture and life, it is an easy misconception that we can step back into the hole we left when we went to the field. It hurts to find friends and family rushing about their lives without us, often so busy they hardly have the time to stop and welcome us back. But we must recognize that even as life has moved on for us, so it has for our loved ones. Our best friends have new friends to call up when they want to chat. They have moved on to new jobs, added new family members. The church is full of new people. Our Sunday school class and other responsibilities are being handled well by others. There are jokes and anecdotes and under-currents we don’t get, and no one bothers to fill us in. They are happy to see us, of course, but we are visitors now, no longer part of their daily lives. Our space is no longer there.

“Why don’t they care?” we demand as furloughing missionaries. “How can they go about their lives as though there wasn’t a world of poverty and hunger and pain and need out there?” But our loved ones are the same normal North Americans we left. It is we who have been shaken out of our mold, for better or worse, by sights, peoples, experiences, political and economic realities they have not seen and will never understand. We have come to accept that for the rest of our lives, the only ones who will truly understand us are those who have gone through similar experiences.

It isn’t that our loved ones don’t care about us or love us anymore. They do. But their world is no longer ours. They do not understand what we have gone through or realize what we were expecting of them. Not until we could forgive family and friends for not measuring up to our own unrealistic expectations could we release them from those expectations and simply enjoy their fellowship when we come home."

I hope that I will be able to truly enjoy my time in the States. I want to hear about your lives and what's been happening while I've been gone. I'll try not to bore you with stories you don't really want to hear. I know that there will be some people that will be more interested than others and there may be some who don't even know I've been gone. But I'll try not to be too hard on them. After all, I've had many more years of being on the "sending" side and I've had my share of times when I couldn't remember where a certain missionary was serving or whether they had just gotten back from the field or were getting ready to leave. It's sad, but true. So, am I ready? I think so. Now if I could just find the time to pack my suitcases. :-)