It happens sometimes at the most mundane of moments— driving down a familiar road and the way a building makes Margot burst into tears because something about it reminds her of our old neighborhood in Tianjin. A neighborhood that looks nothing like the one we now live in, mind you. But something about the color and construction of this building sends her memory halfway around the world to our friends who are still there in that place, and the routines we had with them.
Don’t worry. This is not a post about missing China.
It is about what happens when things change. And this, while not reserved only for those who move to a different country, is something that takes time to get used to. Because what occurs in those everyday moments like when we are sitting down to dinner, or shopping for groceries, or getting into the car to head to church, and what keeps occurring in all of the cracks and crevices of our daily lives, is this inward dissonant, dare I call it icky feeling of life not being as great as it once was.
This is not a post about making our lives (or America) great again.
And it’s not to say that our life is worse than it once was. I could make lists of things I absolutely in no way miss about our life overseas. And I could make lists of so many ways it was good and wonderful too. Like I said, this is not a post about missing China in particular. Maybe it is simply me forming words about what happens when you or your family goes through a change of any sort. And you slowly start to feel the drip, like a long slow leak, of all the things that you no longer have as a part of your life, or routines, or relationships. You have no idea, before this change occurs, what foundational parts of you will be uprooted, jostled about, rearranged, or forced to undergo major revisions in this turbulent period of moving from one way of life to another.
This is not a post about moving.
There are just so many small things that surprise you, that catch you off guard. I didn’t know ahead of time, even as we spent months thinking through what this decision would mean for our family, how many of our routines would be thrown as it were into a blender, shredded away until they were practically unrecognizable to me. We just have to work at it, I keep saying to myself. We’re still adjusting. We just need time to figure out how to make this work.
But as the year moves on, I am wondering if it’s possible to “make this work” in the old way of doing things. What if what I’m facing is actually just the fact that our life has changed. It won’t, maybe even can’t be what it once was.
This is not a post about what once was.
Well, first some context about what once was. I was talking with someone the other day about the way we used to gather all our kids together in the evenings. She was expressing how it’s been difficult to figure out how to keep having that time as her kids get older and their lives and routines change. You too? I said. How many of those routines we were trying so hard to implement for so many years, suddenly dissolved or became moot because of forces outside our control?
You already know what I’m going to say. This is not a post about family routines.
But for many years there were indeed things that, while imperfect, became something like anchors. They were the things that added up with regularity to be what made our life feel like it was working. They held at bay those things that made our life feel like it was not working.
I think of something as simple as having people in our home. Something that feels so absent now, when for all those years we had meals with others nearly every week. Sunday evenings with our small group, Friday night with the youth group, teenagers on a Saturday morning, neighborhood friends after school. Every Christmas and Easter a large gathering in our home with our framily, and all the other nights of hosting in between.
This is just one thing that I feel the loss of, and that I didn’t know was coming. Give it time, people (Josh, my mom, friends who have been through this) say. And I do try to tell myself that. It is possible we are still doing that awful thing called adjusting. But it is also possible that things have just changed, and I will need to adjust to that. Our house is different here. There are other good things about it, things we did not have before. Maybe the way we host and the meals we serve will look different now, and it will take time for me to find my way in that.
The other week, and I confess it undid me to a far greater degree than it should have, my daughter made an emphatic comment about how we used to do something as a family, and now we don’t. Josh was away, and I was left defenseless. Of course, I felt bad, because that is what I do. But the more that I think about it, this theme of not doing our life the way we once did is an adjustment all in itself. It requires some real inner work on my part. Work that I don’t know I was prepared for.
It is the work of Hey, here’s your life and it looks completely different now, and you must live it anyway and find the way to live it well without constantly looking over your shoulder at what it used to be. It is perhaps nothing more than simply dealing with change.
Is this the temptation that Lot’s wife gave in to? Looking back at what once was and pining after it? What about the temptation to look back and let it make you feel like what you’re doing now isn’t good enough? The temptations are many: to live in regret, to despair that things will never be good again, to compare to others who have it better or different or are doing it well, to be angry or frustrated at the way things are now.
I am sure Jesus never meant for this application to be given to his words, but I can’t help thinking of when he said:
“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins, and both are preserved. And no one, having drunk old wine, immediately desires new; for he says, ‘The old is better.’ ” (Luke 5)
This is not a post about wine.
It is, however, about change. And the life that Jesus calls us to. And even though he is talking here about the kingdom of heaven and a new way of doing things that challenged the old order of Jewish custom and expectations, I can’t help but ask the question in my own life. Am I trying to pour new wine into old wineskins? Am I struggling to let go of the old? Am I putting too much burden on the way things were, and not letting right now also be the good works that God has prepared in advance for me to do (Ephesians 2:10)?
Because he is so good, and kind. As another friend reminded me this week, it wasn’t because we were so wise and figured it out and did such a stellar job that our lives turned out this way (or were that way). It was purely because of his goodness and grace. The same goodness and grace that is here with us now, even in these icky new wineskins.*
*I am not saying where we are now is icky. You understand me.
This reminds me of the Sara Groves song :
“I’ve been painting pictures of Egypt
Leaving out what it lacks
The future feels so hard
And i wanna go back
But the places that used to fit me
Cannot hold the things I’ve learned
And those roads were closed off to me
While my back was turned.”
Praying for you in this season of transition and finding new ways of living within these new boundary lines.