Okay, so a few more today.
There are some difficult aspects to this shared life (and the simplicity it almost necessarily requires), and those aspects seem very distinct from our experience in Korea.
To begin with: our own expectations. Something weird happens when you cross over the Pacific Ocean. This process has further challenged our notions of comfortable and successful living. In Korea, we had no expectations … we didn’t know what to expect. Here we do.
In Korea, we ate Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches for a month because that’s all we could recogninze at the local market (and bread, cereal and milk). Anything, including furniture found on the street (known as “roadkill”), became an immediate blessing. People shared junky cars and common vans, which then translated into better communication and possible improved character.
Everything else was put aside. We cared less about things and more about people. We felt lighter, more free. We had food to eat, clothes to wear, and a place to lay our head. What more did we need?
Then we crossed a boundary and things mattered again. I didn’t have my own car, and my eye was pulled in the direction of everyone else’s. I paid attention to car commercials that were so silly months before. Every house for sale caught my stare. All the things that didn’t matter to us in Korea mattered to us now.
This is exacerbated by other’s expectations. For four years, no one cared that we were renting an apartment. Now they have a problem understanding why we are renting a house. While we were “missionaries”, no one mentioned concerns about retirement money or building equity or living the American Dream.
Now they do. And this makes living as missionaries in America much more difficult. Because as we fight our own materialistic expectations, we hear those same ideas reinforced by those still in the midst of things we have been set free from.
And once you’ve been set free, sometimes you have to fight to stay free. You have to let certain comments roll off of your back.
“You mean, your kids are going to SHARE a room?”
“Don’t you want your own space?”
“You know, there are some great houses for sale in my neighborhood.”
“Aren’t you just throwing your money away?”
Thankfully, God has brought others to a similar place, a place of simplification, freedom, community and mobility. These few, these “happy few”, bless us by looking us in the eye, saying, “You’re not alone … you may be crazy, but crazy people are the ones who hear directly from God.”
God must love me because He has had these people stuck in lonely corners of the world all throughout my life. They are true, spiritual family.
Peace.