Living in close community with a group of people and working toward a common goal can be a richly rewarding experience. Friendships forged here can be deep and lifelong. At the same time, we never know when we're going to have to say goodbye to yet another person, and that instability can make it tough to invest in new friendships.
It feels like we're always saying goodbye to someone. The way things work for most missionaries is that you'll do 3 or 4 years in the field, then a year back in your home country before returning for your next few years in the field. Of course, people aren't necessarily assigned to the same place long term, so there are always people coming and going.
If your schedules don't line up you may well end up with two years at a time between seeing some friends and coworkers. Those who have been doing this for ten or fifteen years will have met and said goodbye to a great number of people. There may be relatively few stable, long term relationships that they are able to maintain either on the field or at home because of time and distance.
Add to that, while most goodbyes are planned, not all of them are. Back home, if a close friend had a family emergency, job problems or medical issues they would probably still be nearby. When it happens in the field it often means they catch the next flight out, and they may or may not come back. Lose a few friends this way and you'll quickly understand how establishing and maintaining healthy relationships can get complicated.
That said, I would never trade the time I had with friends here, even if the goodbyes were abbreviated or nonexistent. There are stories that we can tell each other that no one else would ever understand. If you ever hear two missionaries comparing the quality of various grass air strips on New Guinea, you'll pick up on what I'm saying. Please don't judge us too harshly... when we're back in our home countries, there are not many people we can relate to in this way!
With "goodbye" looming ever nearer for us in our current assignment this has been very much on my mind lately. The friends who have known us the longest are all back in Canada and we cannot wait to see them, but our friends here have known us in a way that our Canadian friends won't be able to.
Even as we celebrate our return to Canada, friends here grieve our departure (I think they grieve... they say they grieve... let's just say they grieve), and we grieve their loss as well. We feel torn now, between Asia and North America, and I'm not sure we'll ever feel fully at home in either of them anymore. On the other hand, we also needn't feel alone in either place.
This stuff can really mess with your head. No wonder missionaries end up being so weird.
Theo
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