Where ten years has taken us

My husband and I recently celebrated ten years of marriage. It's been a busy decade - we've lived in four different places spread out across two countries and added three children to our family. When we married, we both had a desire to serve long term abroad. My husband had already gone to Bible college and was working as an assistant pastor ahead of overseas ministry. If you'd told us then, as we dreamed of the future in the little yellow kitchen of our first house, that we would go and we would come back after five years and end up 30 miles away from where we started, I'm not sure we'd have believed you.

And yet here we are.

Seven and a half years ago, my husband and I sold that house, packed up our lives into a few suitcases and took our ten month old son to a country on the edge of Central Asia. We planned to stay a long time - we thought fifteen years would be a good stretch before our children's educational needs would probably require a move back to the UK. We were committed to serving and supporting the young church in that country. We, who were never large city people, went first to a very large city for language and culture learning. After a couple of years, we moved to a city of 'only' a million people and where creative access was needed to get visas. And then after a while the rules changed and our creative access route didn't work any more. Our local pastor in that city asked us to move back to the UK and come and visit as much as we could, which avoided all visa requirements. So (cutting a long story short) we did. We only spent five years in that country that we planned to spend so much longer in.

From the biographies I devoured as a child and teenager, I absorbed an idea that the longer you went to the 'field' for, the better a cross-cultural worker you were. The ideal was to go without a return ticket but with your coffin, although a few decades was long enough to be respectable. There was Adoniram Judson's letter to John Hasseltine asking not only permission to marry his daughter Ann, but that John would agree to "see her no more in this world". There was James Calvert's (unverified, as far as I can find) quote, said in reply to the ship's captain who told him he would lose his life by landing on the islands of Fiji, "we died before we came here." There are stirring calls not to be half-hearted, not to waste our lives, not to invest in what won't last. If that seems too nineteenth century, I've met people who tell me that they plan to live the rest of their lives in the country they have gone to, with visits back to their passport country every now and then.

Cross-cultural workers throughout history, from the Apostle Paul to Hudson Taylor to Amy Carmichael to current workers, have left behind a lot and willingly embraced a whole heap of hard things for the sake of the Gospel. Many have died or been martyred for the Gospel. Others have sacrificed their health (physical, mental and/or emotional), comforts, freedoms and opportunities. Their families have sacrificed too. We rightly honour the work that God has done through them and in them and praise God for them.

But when your standard is Jim Elliot and Gladys Aylward, what do you do with the cross-cultural workers who, for a whole host of different reasons, return to their passport country after just a few years? If the unspoken but pervading church culture around us prizes faithfulness through long years of service (perhaps with little fruit), what do those whose years of service were cut short for one reason or another think? When we've made our historical heroes ten feet tall, no average height human will ever compare. I wonder what my nineteen-year-old self, who had the words of the hymn 'Facing a Task Unfinished' pinned up above her desk, would make of me now.  

Perhaps there's a bigger issue here - that while we might outwardly reject a sacred/secular divide, we admire the exciting and exotic more than we do the boring and mundane. Even living abroad, it's certainly easier to mention earthquakes, terrorist attacks and coup attempts in prayer letters than bureaucracy and getting your boiler replaced when you don't understand how the system works. Maybe it's more glamorous to love your neighbour when they're an unreached people worshipping idols than to love your neighbour when they're your child or elderly parent needing your physical presence in your passport country.

Maybe there are many more issues at play here. Issues of God's leading and guidance, of Christian heroes and sometimes idols, of not despising small things, of pride and shame.

But here's what I know. Jesus said, 'Go and make disciples of all nations'. He didn't say that you have to go abroad to make disciples of all nations. He did not say that if you go to serve cross-culturally, you must go for a minimum of ten years and the longer you go for, the better. He didn't say that you have to pick a country and go spend the rest of your life there.

Here's something else that I know. In all things, God works for the good of those who love him. The last ten years have incorporated a lot of uncertainty and change. Our life plan was completely turned upside down when we came back to the UK. But the Lord knew that would happen, and before we had even moved to our second city abroad, when we were still planning to be there many years, he was setting in motion the events that would bring us to our current church and town. When we came back, we had absolutely no idea why God had worked things out that way but believed that God is good and in control. Two and a bit years later, we now know that a health condition of one of our children would almost certainly have required us to relocate back to the UK had we still been abroad.

We would never have predicted that we'd be in this town, in this country, ten years after getting married. But we can say with confidence that the Lord is good. He does not make mistakes or waste experiences. His ways are not our ways - thankfully. We can say with faith and with gratitude that the boundary lines have fallen for us in pleasant places.

Growing plants and meeting people

 Last July, I turned up at a community gardening volunteer session with my three children in tow. I'd been told about the sessions by a Muslim friend. The local council has a small site filled to the brim with a couple of polytunnels and raised beds and containers as well as a little market garden down the road. They invite members of the public to volunteer, helping to grow fruit and vegetables, and donate the produce to a local foodbank. I was intrigued as I'd long wanted to get involved in food growing. Not only that, but the site was close to our church. I wondered if this would give me a chance to get to know non-Christians and offer opportunities to share the Gospel.

Fast forward nearly a year, and we are still turning up one morning a week. I help with a variety of tasks such as planting out seedlings, weeding, re-creating 'no dig' beds and harvesting, depending on the time of year. We home educate our three boys (aged 7, 5 and 3) so they come along with me and get as involved as they want to - sometimes they are eager to get involved with tasks (trundling empty wheelbarrows back to compost bins and soil sieving are favourites) and other times they prefer to play by themselves. Looking back at the last year, the community gardening has been one of the most worthwhile activities that we've got involved in.

It is helpful in several different ways for us to get our hands in the earth and to work hard together at something physical. We are formed from the dust of the ground and it does us good to get out into the fresh air and remember that our daily bread is literally coming from crops growing up out of the muddy ground. We've learned about patience waiting for seeds to sprout. We definitely learned something about resilience when we planted out onions in the pouring rain. Watching kale continue to grow through the frosty winter, scrabbling around in the earth harvesting potatoes and marvelling at the most enormous parsnip showed us God's goodness and led us to worship. Isn't it amazing that the tiny seeds we plant grow up into large plants that we can harvest and eat? Watching plants grow still feels a little bit magic to me. Then, depending on the plant, we might be harvesting the root, the tuber, the stem, the fruit, the flower or the leaves! In amongst the goodness, there have been other truths to see in the garden too. When the entire pumpkin patch fell victim to an early frost, when the slugs gorged themselves on the lettuces, when the carrots were suffocated by weeds we tasted the bitterness of fallen creation.

More importantly, it has been a fantastic way to get to know local people who, I think it is fair to say, are very unlikely to have just turned up at church or come along to a church event. The number of volunteers at each session varies and there is often significant turnover but gradually I've been able to get to know some of the people who, like us, turn up most weeks. One recent history graduate shared her story of growing up Hindu and then embracing Zen Buddhism with me over a vegetable bed. As we talked about how we practised our different faiths, I was able to share with her about Christmas and why it matters for Christians. Chatting while working together on a job gives surprising opportunities for listening to people and learning about them, as well as sharing appropriately ourselves. My other realisation has been just how many people are lonely and need to work. The natural demographic for a weekday volunteering session is those out of regular paid work - whether those looking for work, unable to work, retired or not in paid work for some other reason. We know that we were made to work and some people seem to have come along for something to do and someone to do it with. Jesus' ministry focused on the poor and needy and it is great to be able to get to know some of these people in a context where we are working with dignity alongside each other as equals to help others. An older gentleman who came along for a while gave my boys a telescope. He told me that he had been saving the telescope to pass down to his own children and he had realised he had passed the age of having children. He told me that my children were the only children he knew and so he wanted to gift the telescope to them.

This is not to say it's been easy. I urgently called my boys out of the way when an argument between two volunteers looked like it was going to come to blows. While my children are usually the only children there, one of the volunteers occasionally brings her similarly aged son in the school holidays. She has a female partner and I wonder when and how I tell my children that their new friend is probably going to talk about his two mums at some point. One gentleman who comes has occasionally been slightly (and understandably) frustrated at the children sometimes getting in the way. The man who gave us the telescope also shared conspiracy theories with my seven year old. Sometimes the boys are bored and want to go home and sometimes I want to go home as well. And then I think what a privilege it is that we get to meet people from all walks of life and we see God's common grace and the brokenness of sin in each and every person.

When we moved to our town, I desperately wanted to put roots down in the local community, to teach my children about how to plant seeds and trust God to send rain on the righteous and the unrighteous, and to get to know non-Christians. Volunteering in our community garden is enabling me to do exactly that.