Crossing Back Over

Returning Home Without Arrival

“Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go” Joshua 1:9

We returned to the United States following our hasty exit out of India in pieces. Tom and the children came back first, landing in Virginia in late January of 1997. From there they drove the RV over twenty-eight hundred miles back to Central Oregon, crossing Texas and pushing through ice and snow. Tom swore he would never attempt that kind of winter journey again. I did not argue.

Nathaniel and I remained behind in Nepal for several more weeks. We were studying language and culture and continuing work on the evangelistic cassette tape project that had grown quietly over the years. When we finally rejoined the family in mid-February, it felt less like a homecoming and more like stepping onto moving ground.

We had left Asia together as a family. We returned with each of us already being pulled in different directions.

Our eldest son had just turned sixteen. Soon after our arrival in Bend, he obtained his driver’s license and began finishing his senior year of high school. He also started working at a publishing company in nearby Sisters. Almost overnight, he was driving, working, and preparing for college. Dating was even a possibility now that we were back home, and I was not at all sure how I felt about that.

As a mother, I felt the jolt sharply. Overseas, we had lived as a tightly knit community. Life had been shared. Decisions were made together. Now, without ceremony, we were preparing to release our firstborn into adulthood. I was grateful, proud, and quietly undone, all at once.

One son was completing tenth grade through homeschooling. Another was in eighth grade. Our older daughter entered sixth grade, while the younger children settled into the rhythms of elementary school. For the spring semester, several of them attended Morning Star Christian School, and they seemed to adjust more easily than I did. Our youngest, at four years old, remained observant, curious, and endlessly verbal, taking in far more than we realized.

We also began attending Vineyard Christian Fellowship, where the congregation had just moved into a new building. Worshiping there felt like a tentative re-rooting. Old wounds from previous church transitions were still tender, but they were no longer raw. We were received with kindness, without interrogation or expectation, and that gentleness mattered more than we could name at the time. As we invested in this new community, the sense of abandonment and betrayal that had followed us for some time slowly began to loosen its grip.

There were moments when it felt as though we were crossing a river we had been approaching for years. Not triumphantly, not with banners raised, but step by step, carrying what we could and trusting God with the rest.

At the same time, life did not slow. Tom and I traveled back to Asia in April for networking meetings related to ongoing work in the Himalayan region. One of our sons took a temporary job as a busboy and dishwasher in an assisted care center while continuing his schooling. The work was humble and steady, and he carried it well.

By early summer, our calendar was full again. One of my daughters and I attended a women’s conference in Toronto. In July, our entire family traveled to a conference in Yakima, Washington, where we were refreshed in ways we had not known we needed. Throughout the spring and summer, two of our sons prepared and raised support for a youth mission trip to the Czech Republic and Poland with a team from our church. That journey was a significant milestone in their lives.

In mid-August, we traveled to Oklahoma to settle our eldest son at Oral Roberts University. Sitting beside him during orientation, listening to the speakers and watching the faces of so many young students, I felt the quiet ache of letting go. He and I had always been close. Leaving him there felt like laying something precious into unfamiliar hands.

As we sat together, the Lord spoke gently to my heart. I have this. He is in My hands now. The words did not remove the ache, but they steadied me. I left with a peace I could not manufacture.

Through all of this, one steady thread continued quietly in the background. The evangelism project involving the distribution of cassette tapes, first set in motion during an unforeseen layover in Bangkok several years earlier, was still unfolding. What had begun as an interruption had become an ongoing partnership, carried under the name the Barnabas Project. Even as our geography shifted and our family life re-formed, this work continued, slowly extending into several nations across Asia.

Our role was not to lead from the front, but to come alongside, strengthen, and serve. We remained in close relationship with local Himalayan leaders we had been mentoring, and their networks continued to flourish.

By the end of summer, the pace had not relented. We were moving often, adjusting constantly, and learning to live without the sense of settled belonging one might have expected to feel upon returning home. The United States was familiar, yet it no longer felt entirely like home. We were becoming, in ways we did not yet fully understand, third culture people, shaped by places we loved and left, and strangely set apart now from those who had known us before.

Still, God was faithful. In quiet ways, He was knitting together what had been stretched thin. He was teaching us how to live obediently without clarity, how to release what we loved without certainty about what would come next, how to nurture relationships at a distance, and how to trust Him with the spaces in between.

We were home, and yet we were not finished crossing. We were learning to follow God forward without the comfort of arrival. Pioneer seemed to be descriptive of our journey.

[The songs from this journey are also gathered in the Spotify playlist “Dancing on Raindrops.”Or, visit the YouTube playlist “Dancing on Raindrops”.]

Reflection

In your life, do you feel caught between what has been left behind and what has not yet taken shape? What does it look like for you to keep walking with God when clarity has not yet come and no destination specified? How might God be inviting you to trust His presence in a season that does not feel settled or complete?