The Romance of Unreciprocated Love
I dance around and around. I do a handstand. I stand on a chair. I jump off a chair. I make a paper airplane coated with love poetry and send it sailing. I recite Browning’s How Do I Love Thee? loudly…
I dance around and around. I do a handstand. I stand on a chair. I jump off a chair. I make a paper airplane coated with love poetry and send it sailing. I recite Browning’s How Do I Love Thee? loudly…
It took time to wrap my mind around that one. Doesn’t everyone else have nightmares at least once a week about getting a huge pile of letters but not being able to read them?
At that moment, you realize you’re torn. You feel their unease because you’ve been there. You know you should reach out. But there’s another part of you that hesitates. You’re comfortable. You’re occupied. You’ve got friends…
I don’t know why God has placed you in another country. But don’t be afraid that you won’t be accepted or that your story isn’t “cool enough.”
I never expected the parting to be so hard. I never expected to still feel homesick every day three months later. I never expected my heart to feel as though it were trapped in another continent, another country, another home.
God grants us His grace to not only sustain us and enable us to journey well but for us to also extend that grace to others. Grace lights us up so that we can be the light of the world and share His love with even the most undeserving.
We also learned to make use of our heat efficiently by maximizing the number of people in the bathroom. One could shower, with one on the toilet, two brushing their teeth, and another using the washing machine…
Although our emotions sometimes overwhelm us like a storm, they are a passing storm – not permanent – and they do not change the reality that we are loved by God and precious to Him.
It was very relieving when I changed my perspective on success because I no longer had to try to fit into society and have the perfect life that others tried to define for me.
As TCKs, we have a unique advantage for reaching out to foreigners. We know what it’s like to be a cultural misfit, to not quite fit in anywhere. God has given us the incredible gift of understanding what it’s like to be a sojourner. Likewise, He can develop in us the gift of compassion.