the cost of hello.

My Facebook feed is full of Pokemon Go, Hillary and Trump just like yours most likely is. But my feed is also filled with goodbye posts from colleagues of ours that are making their way to Ukarumpa. Soon we will say lots of hellos here again in Uka-land!! But in the mean time, as I wait to hug their necks, my heart has snuck up into my throat… its all to real to me what those hello’s also mean. The reality is that a hello here - a familiar face at store, kids back in the classroom, vacant homes once again filled with life and laughter and of course most importantly staffing needs met again  - all those good things come with a high price. The costs are so numerous, but the hurting hearts of those left behind and the breaking hearts of those doing the leaving  - those are the costs that bring my emotions to the surface.  

We left our girls almost exactly one year ago. I have a picture that I took with my phone of them standing in the driveway waving at us leaving for the airport. I don’t need to look at that picture to know exactly what they were wearing and how they were standing. I don’t need to look at it to remember how it hurt to leave them behind. And how they hurt to be left. 

I can’t pretend that we live in a perfect place here in Ukarumpa. Seriously, even despite my annoyingly optimist tendencies, I could list off item after item after item of wrong and awful and hard things about living in such a tiny and isolated community. (Keeping it real, yo.) However, when times get hard and the hurts run deep, my heart finds simple and complete solidarity with my colleagues. 

There are gazillions of things that cause division for us in this world. Even in this tiny and isolated community things divide us. However, one thing pulls us all closest the fastest – and that is shared pain. A common hurt. An understood experience.  Grief and trauma. These things have a way of blinding the division that once stared us so blankly in the face.

I believe I can speak for us all here in Ukarumpa that it is the shared pain of the hello’s and goodbye’s that bond us the most. 

Fellow Ukarumpians, (especially moms and dads that have left your kiddos far, far away), I am praying for you. I hurt with you and for you. I understand the cost of your sometimes-forced smiles as you settle back into ‘normal’ with people you love missing. I know the heart-confusion you may feel… the excitement to be where the Lord has sent you all mixed in with the ache of learning or re-learning to do life in this place, far away from people who complete your heart and world. I commit to be ready to listen and pray and extend grace as you walk through what life looks like, in this place.  I will hug you and cry with you. And I am anxious to laugh with (or at) you as needed. Thank you for listening and obeying God’s calling to come here to this place with me.

And may you once again find comfort that this is hurt is temporary:

“we are citizens of heaven, where the Lord Jesus Christ lives. And we are eagerly waiting for Him to return as our Savior.” Philippians 3:20 NLT