Forever a Foreigner

I was sitting in my living room this morning, idly gazing out through the glass of my front door as my neighbor across the street helped her toddler put her shoes on, when a thought struck me.

I might be here to see that little girl grow up.

I sat there, stunned.

It was not the first time that long-term thinking has snuck up and startled me. It was only maybe a year ago that I remember asking my mother, with a sense of uneasy wonder, if it was crazy to set my mind on staying in this city for decades (God willing). The thought was so foreign to me that I had trouble grappling with it. How does one even live life under such expectations?

I had heard people talk about 5-year plans and so on, but I could never do it. Planning for a trip six months away made me anxious. Sudden, tremendous changes had been for me the only constant. It only takes the work of a moment to turn your life upside down.

Since I was born, my life has been marked by moves. Some I don’t even remember. For many of my formative childhood years, we moved around moderately, keeping within one city, Pursat. Then, in my early teens, we left Pursat for other provinces (and even another country). Leaving my city ripped from me all my familiar places and people. After that, I was tentative in putting down roots. They were shallow, ready to be pulled out as painlessly as possible.

Throughout all my life, trips to the United States interrupted the years. Some furloughs were longer than others, and we might actually stay in one place for longer than a couple months. Sometimes I made friends. Once I tried to keep up correspondence, but the gaps between emails grew longer, and the common ground we’d once shared faded beneath the weight of distance and the exotic nature of my life in Cambodia. At last, she never wrote back. This left me with pain and a cynicism that never really went away. Friendships, I determined, could not be maintained across the world. I would not try again.

Once I left home for university, I still lived a rather transient existence, living in different places each summer. Then, in my final semester, Covid struck, scattering all the people I knew to the four winds. The usual goodbyes, graduation parties, and the attending of friends’ weddings never happened. Sometimes it felt, relationship-wise, as if my years at college had never even happened.

Well, that’s life, I thought.

Time passed, and God led me through various paths to Cambodia once again, this time as a missionary myself. A couple years in, I realized that here, before me, was a chance to think long-term. I was terribly afraid to do so. I loved being back, not only in Cambodia, but in Pursat, the city I grew up in. But I was afraid to love it too much. What if I had to leave again? I tried to soak it in, on edge for that moment when the world would turn upside down, and I’d have to go. Months passed, and I began to understand that I could not live life like that.

As I found a place to live and began to set up house, I found myself wondering what I should buy. For years and years, any purchase I made was weighed against whether it would be hard to move with it. I might even turn down a cool mug or a book, simply because it would make a future suitcase too heavy. Now I anxiously turned to others for help. Would it be ok to spend money on a large painting? Would that be a foolish expense? I wouldn’t be able to bring it with me if I had to leave. In the end, I bought the painting, and I hung it on the wall.

It felt like a statement.

---

Many months ago, I began to try to understand my own struggles in building relationships. I especially began to notice that there was something wrong in my relationship towards someone I was discipling. When the person was present in front of me, I loved them. When they were gone, I put them from my mind.

The disconnect was too great. I felt the wrongness of it. Why was I doing this? What was off about how I approached people? It wasn’t just this one person, either. It was many people, across many years. People who I loved and befriended sincerely, and yet somehow remained distant from.

As I turned the matter over in my heart, I felt I could trace it back to that move from Pursat, all those years ago. Anyone I knew before that move, be they family or friends, I had embraced with a warmth that was missing from all those that came after. This meant, then, that since that time I had begun to unconsciously put up a guard. Before I even met new people, I was ready to part. Before I said, “Hello,” I had already resolved that there would be no tears when I said, “Goodbye.” If I wrote, or called, or messaged, I made no commitment to ongoing communication. I would mourn no lack of reply if I never looked for one.

Was I a cold, heartless person? This thought tore me apart inside. I felt as if I no longer knew who I was. How could something so fundamental to life as relationship building be so twisted inside me? I was at a loss. I did not even know to fix or change it. In particular, as someone in full-time ministry, I felt as though I must be a failure. Did I even know how to love others correctly? I felt despair.

But God is not a God of despair. He gave me Psalm 139.

"O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
    you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down
    and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
    behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.
You hem me in, behind and before,
    and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
    it is high; I cannot attain it.

For you formed my inward parts;
    you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
    my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
    intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
    the days that were formed for me,
    when as yet there was none of them."

God knew about this already. He knew it before I did. He knew exactly who I would be and what baggage I would carry, and he chose me to be his child anyway. And he didn’t just choose me, he created me in the first place, with every day formed for me written before I was born. My shock and panic were unnecessary. I still had worth in my King’s eyes.

I asked Him to work in my heart, to show me how to change and heal. He began to undo, little by little, the years of habits born from fear of loss, patterns of thinking unknown even to myself. I could hardly even tell what he was doing. I could only see, here and there, in my closeness to those around me, signs of a thawing and spring.

And today, for the little girl across the street, the implications of long-term thinking soaked into my mind. I need to talk to that little girl. I need to get to know her mom.

Relationships aren’t just today, with a maybe goodbye tomorrow. They are possibility, of months, of years, of eternity. And this I still don’t quite know how to approach. But I will learn, until meeting you is only joy and possibility, unshadowed by fears of farewell, until all farewells are over and done with, in Immanuel’s kingdom that cannot be shaken.