Our mid-home assignment holiday

We're fresh back from holidays. So much happened during our time away that I want to take some time to write it down and process it a little here. But I'll also share some beautiful Queensland scenery that we saw!

Two and a half weeks ago, on Saturday Jun 27th, we drove to what Australians call the Sunshine Coast. It's the coastal area north of Brisbane (as opposed to the Gold Coast, which is south). This part of Queensland includes several cities and towns and about 60 km of coastline. It's one of the holiday "playgrounds" of southern Queensland. My family took a number of holidays there when I was a child. 

We spent the weekend meeting people and speaking at a supporting church, which was both busy and very encouraging. 

Wurtula Beach on Sunshine Coast

But, from the Monday we were on holidays, free of obligations and deliberately took a break from email and social media and staying up-to-date with stuff. We were thankful for a free housesitting opportunity close to the beach for a week. Though we didn't swim, we walked along the beach several times. We even got to collect and eat fresh eggs from the house chooks. I came down with a cold during this week and was thankful for time to rest.

Our youngest son and a friend also joined us there for 24 hours. We had fun hanging out and playing games. It was fun to cook for them too.

Urban chooks...who were a bit more fussy than the 
country chooks we've met.

Nice walkway just inland from the beach where we were staying.

Moss on Wurtulla Beach

The Peanut Van was a flash back to my two years living in Kingaroy in the
Burnett region of Queensland. We were thrilled to find they sold nuts other than peanuts.

I hadn't thrown off the cold before we had to vacate that lovely house and drive north for about seven hours, but, suitably medicated, I coped with the drive. Waiting for us in Central Queensland was David's family. We caught up with both his siblings, their spouses, and most of his nephews and nieces. 

We parked my parents' motorhome (our transport and often our bed for these 2 ½ weeks) outside my mother-in-law's house and slept there for our stay, keeping her guest rooms free for our eldest son and his family, who drove down from North Queensland to meet us. They also got to meet most of David's immediate family. It was the first time for almost any of them to meet our daughter-in-law and granddaughter. Another first was all of David's siblings with their spouses (and David's mum) to get together for a meal without any kids!

The "Singing Ship" of Emu Park. An installation that "sings" with the wind.
It commemorates the discovery and naming of Keppel Bay by Captain Cook
in 1770.

Locals know this as "Causeway", it's south of Yeppoon. I discovered this is a place of nostalgia for David's siblings who spent their childhood in this area. The Causeway Lake is a tidal estuary that was created in the 1930s by building a bridge and road link across the mouth of a creek. It's a popular recreation area. We had lunch here one day with family.

On the road again. It's been 2 ½ years since we spent two months in this
motorhome, but it felt very familiar when we hopped in here again.

It was several days of a lot of family—especially a lot for these two expats who usually live on the other side of the ocean to family! But it was worthwhile to take the time to reconnect with family, because at the end of the day, regardless of everything else, we're related to them all.

We did get four precious days with our granddaughter, who, at seven months old, was very different to when we last met her as a newborn. She was full of smiles (and frowns, and very much knew the difference between her parents and everyone else). We ate and played, explored and rested. My daughter-in-law and I took over my mother-in-law's kitchen for a time preparing food for our mob.

But, then we also had to say goodbye to them all. Maybe my heart has grown tough? I didn't find it as difficult as you might think I would. I guess we've accepted (long ago) that we don't live close to family and therefore don't have the same expectations of our relationships with them? 

In some ways it was a relief to head off on our own for the next six days and have some very slow days. We were tired and a bit over-peopled, and also noting that we've been living in other people's homes (very nice and generous people!) and away from our own little apartment since mid-May. 

We split the journey south in two, driving about four hours on the Thursday to Lake Monduran (west of Bundaberg) and the Saturday to Lake Somerset (south of Kilcoy). And then, on Tuesday this week we drove two hours to return the motorhome to my parents and a bit over an hour back to our hosts in Ipswich. A fair bit of driving, but in many ways that's part of our Australian DNA as "country kids". Driving country roads just feels normal to us and something we have to do to visit family. Also, having spent two months driving through four states and territories in that same motorhome back in 2024, we felt very much at home on the road in it.

We indulged in some free Mini Golf at one of the campsites.

Our second campsite (Lake Somerset) had many kangaroos, especially 
after the school holiday crowds left. It's fun seeing them
lounging around, free to come and go and not in a zoo!

Sunset cast a beautiful glow on the lake and surrounds.

We enjoyed a roast dinner one night in the motorhome. I quite enjoy
cooking in its tiny, but well-equipped kitchen. We didn't actually roast
the chicken in the van, we bought it already cooked, but the motorhome 
has an oven, so I could have roasted a chook myself if I'd desired to. The
vegetables were all cooked on the gas stovetop.

One of our delights is finding an Aussie burger (including beetroot) at a country shop.
These were bought on our journey between campsites, at Ban Ban Springs.

The first campsite. Most of the people at this site were fishermen.

Sunset over Lake Monduran.

There were signs at the Lake Monduran campsite advertising this as a
walking track, but we found it fairly dissatisfying. Very high grass and a washed out
bridge (below) that didn't allow us to complete the full walk.

Also Lake Monduran (and below).

Our time on our own at those two lakes comprised of reading, solving various puzzles in two puzzle magazines bought for the purpose, walking around the local area, doing laundry, cooking, and generally just resting and re-setting prior to the push of the last three weeks of deputation we have to do before flying back to Japan.

Looking back at our time away we are so thankful for time with various family members, including each of our sons individually. A friend pointed out one interesting theme: that we played board games with each of our sons during our time away (either in person or online!

For some time we have been discussing what home assignment would look like for us after all our kids left home. One of the key decision points to doing any home assignment is what to do about the responsibilities that you hold in your country of service. As a school teacher, it isn't easy to take random lengths of time off to do a home assignment. Most teachers would do it during their summer break. Otherwise it means taking six months or a year off as anything else is difficult for a school to manage. But home assignment is work, so taking all of that holiday time to work isn't the wisest course. Therefore one "big rock" that we had to plan for this shorter home assignment was holiday time, because we need to get back to Japan refreshed, not ready for a break as we'll both be jumping back into work within a couple of days of landing there. Having this break part-way through our 11 weeks in Australia was hopefully a good choice. 

A friend asked me the other day if we'll do this style of home assignment the same next time. I said we'll finish this one and let the dust settle before we evaluate it. So, stay tuned! (Might I say it also depends on what we're allowed to do, we had to get approval from a number of different people in order to pull this one off.)

Anyway, that's enough reflecting for one blog post. If you've read this far then I'm impressed as I've written for myself as much as anyone!

Many opportunities

The home assignment sprint continues, more like a 400m than a 100m! 

Despite the busyness, so far we've had many wonderful opportunities to talk to a variety of people. Last Saturday we spent several hours meeting people at a church hall, people who hadn't been able to catch us anywhere else. This "open house" style of meeting is an efficient way of catching up with folk when we have limited time to make individual appointments.

I've had two different team meetings this week with colleagues in Japan. I'm thankful the time difference is only one hour! But each of these meetings have jerked my head around: I'm both in Australia and in Japan and it's a bit challenging. Certainly I wouldn't encourage newer missionaries to attempt such continuity of Japan-based ministry while on home assignment!

We've also been attending to medical needs: skin cancer checks and mission medicals and the action points from those (including an iron infusion for myself), women's health screening, etc.

We've cooked two Japanese meals this week for each of our younger two sons (and others), and spent extra time with them. I forgot to take a photo of the chocolate cheesecake I made them :D I'm treasuring these times with them.

As a result, this week there has been less opportunity to rest, and that's probably why we've been feeling more ragged heading into another full weekend.

I really want to write more here...but I'm almost out of time and energy this week. 

We've got a whirlwind of things on in the next four days. These are some of the things going on:

• Three public speaking opportunities (which need Powerpoints and scripts finalised).
• 300+ km of driving over two days.
• Meeting up with two different couples over coffee and then a meal on Saturday.
• An online meeting with Japan-based colleagues for David.
• Planning and shopping for our own food (not something we've had to do in the last five weeks as we've stayed with people who've provided most of our meals).
• Packing up, then unpacking into my parents' motorhome (our mode of transport and accommodation some nights in the coming 2 ½ weeks).
• Answering some emails and finishing up a few Japan-ministry bits and pieces before we go on holidays from Monday.

We're tired and hankering after that holiday—just have to get through these final days before we get there!

Our holiday will include time on our own as well as time with family, including four nights with our granddaughter and her parents.

Please pray for God's strength and grace in these coming days!

Time to rest (and move)

One of the biggest challenges of a short, fast-paced home assignment is getting rest. We've designated each Monday as a day off and have that written on our online shared calendar. It's important to decide that beforehand otherwise a dangerous "creep" can happen and you end up with not enough time to truly rest. Also, we're trying to have a mentality that downtime can happen at other times too. This week we have meetings on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. It'll be wise to have rest time during the day on those days (and probably Friday morning too...after an evening event I often don't sleep well).

Yesterday (Monday), on our designated day off, we went a little further afield for a longer walk. White Rock Conservation Park is not far from our home church in Redbank Plains, Ipswich. We've lived around this area several times in the last 15 years and yet never gone to the park, though I've heard it mentioned many times by people. Yesterday we had good weather, plus the time and energy to go and explore it. We ended up walking seven kilometres through typical Queensland bushland. It was a delightful outing that was good for us on many fronts.

There were so many gorgeous trees, mostly a typical Queensland eucalyptus forest.

The "rock" itself is a sandstone outcrop. We walked from the carpark in to the rock and out again.

We saw a number of kangaroos, but none so close as these two who calmly grazed on grass as we walked within a few metres of them.

When we were almost back to our car we passed this kookaburra. He was perched at head height, only a metre or so off the track and also didn't move as we walked past, pausing to take his photo.

Pondering our uncommon "walking around life"

Before we went on home assignment in 2023 I was reading a book called Uncommon Ground, a collection of essays brought together by Tim Keller and John Inazu with perspectives from people thinking deeply and working daily to live with these times. Here are some of my reflections on that in light of our upcoming time in Australia:

Home assignment means meeting
up with people for various reasons.
On Saturday we met up with a 
member of our church in Tokyo,
someone we'd never met before.
We got to walk for the first time on
this cool bridge across the Brisbane
river.

In the case of a missionary on home assignment, we have to "translate" overseas mission and Japan to Australians. In general people we encounter there don't clearly understand what we do or where we do it. If you've followed my blog for a long time, you'll know that our work in Australia is composed of answering a lot of questions.

Much patience and diligence is required in translation. Much attention to detail as well as sensitivity to the wider picture. My work as an editor is also translation to some degree. I have to ensure that the writer's intent is accurately and appealingly translated into words that the audience will understand and not stumble over. And of course, as a writer who writes about cross-cultural life, I am translating my experience, life in Japan, and missionary life, into words so that others can understand. Pretty similar, in a way, to what we do on HA, except that as a writer and editor, I can hide behind my screen, rather than have to engage people face to face, or stand up in front of an audience with no time to edit my answers. (from here)

In the midst of another home assignment, one that is far more fast paced, the thoughts about still resonates with me. I'd definitely rather be working behind the scenes, but alas, God has given us this thing to do and we're getting on with doing it.

These last few weeks, when I have some free time and energy, I've been gradually making my way through A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene H. Peterson, the author of the Bible paraphrase: The Message. A Long Obedience. It is a book that I heard about early in our time in Japan but have only now gotten my hands on a copy. I didn't realise that it was a book on discipleship based on the Songs of Ascent, Psalms 120–134. It's a good read!

The chapter I read on Tuesday was based on Psalm 123 and in it Peterson connects it with Romans 12:1–2:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (The Message)

Below is how I more commonly recognise this passage: 

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1-2 NIV).

The Message version of the passage stands out to me because the intro that I'm giving to our formal presentations includes a series of statements about what our ordinary lives in Japan looks like. Our "walking around life". We tend to think of service to God as the extraordinary stuff, not the stuff of ordinary life. As we talk from the front of churches and other gatherings I'm deliberately framing our stories as being from the place where God has set us down. (From the quote that Alistair Begg uses from his mentor Eric Alexander: "There's no ideal place to serve God, except the place he sets you down.")

And of course the other thing that stands out is the observation about culture. As we move between our two "home" cultures, we see things that people who are immersed in them don't necessarily see so clearly. It doesn't make us experts in either culture, but it does give us a unique perspective. Perhaps not fitting so well into either culture is an advantage, helping us to focus our attention on God as Paul instructs us to do?

I'll continue to ponder this and other thoughts in this book while I go about my "walking around life", which, this afternoon includes the joy of hanging out in an Australian library :-) and even borrowing some physical books!

Sprinting through the weeks

We enjoyed a walk in Toowoomba's
Japanese garden.

We're starting to get into the swing of things in this home assignment now. It's fast-paced and exhausting! Manageable, though, as long as we're mindful that rest is needed. Home assignment is usually tiring, but in the past it's been a much longer and slower affair. This time we're "sprinting," but we can look forward to the "race" being over soon.

And a scone with coffee and chai.

Walking with my parents' lively dog
that reminds us so much of the
literary Harry MacLary of
Donaldson's Dairy.

We spent a week in Toowoomba with my parents enjoying catching up with them and others who live in that city. 

We spent Friday afternoon with closer friends and on Saturday we held an open afternoon in my parents' home and five people came, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s. 

On Sunday we shared the microphone for about 40 minutes up the front of my parents' church. It's very rare to be given so much time during a church service to talk about missions and we're grateful. David hadn't had time to write a sermon, so we filled the time with various stories about our lives and ministry as well as the needs in Japan and also challenged the church to pray right then about what we'd been sharing. 

The next challenge we face is how to condense that into just 10 minutes (the time slots we have this coming Saturday and Sunday).

By Monday we really needed some downtime, but ended up spending time with my great aunt in the morning and with another former OMF missionary in the afternoon. On Tuesday we downed tools, stopped looking at email, writing our prayer letter, and other tasks, and just rested—it was very restorative. On Wednesday we headed back to Brisbane and started preparing for this coming weekend of events.

Toowoomba is about 600m above sea level,
it's perched on the edge of the Great Dividing
Range and the climate there is definitely cooler
than down on the plain in Brisbane. It's 
renowned for its fog and we certainly got
some of that.

It's always good to spend time with family when we're in Australia, though we are acutely reminded that there's no making up the time that we haven't been here. It's difficult sometimes not to feel melancholy or guilty. I don't often feel like we've sacrificed much to do what we've done, but time with family can be a reminder of that, and a reminder that they've sacrificed a lot too.

Settling into Australia again

It's amazing to me to recognise that it's already a week since we left Japan! 

What has re-entry been like this time?

Very smooth. We have, in fact, been in Australia quite recently: three times in the last 18 months! Once for a wedding, once for a new granddaughter, and once for a holiday. So it doesn't feel much like we've been away since our last home assignment two years ago. When I remember what a stressful thing home assignments have been in the past, this seems very easy. 

We haven't had to buy new phones or sign up for internet, we haven't had to find and furnish a new house, we haven't had to enrol our kids in a new school or settle them into a land that they hardly know, and we haven't had to find a new car. We're very blessed, for about half of these 11 weeks, to be able to occupy part of the bottom floor of our friends' house and share the use of one of their cars.

Any shocks?

Not really, not yet...re-entry shocks mostly happen when you've been away a longer period. They usually comprise of: 

incremental changes within society and friends that add up over the years + 

incremental changes within ourselves while we're away that we don't notice +

big life changes (e.g. health changes, lifestyle changes, family changes).

Because we've been in Australia four times in the last three years, most of the changes are still incremental, not shocking. And none of our immediate family or closest friends have endured large changes since we saw them last.

Starting (and finishing) faster

The biggest difference is that we've had to charge into other home assignment jobs at a faster rate. We finished work on Tuesday and left on Wednesday. In the last three days we've already had our eyes checked and started on other medical checks. We've got our first speaking engagement this Sunday and an open "day" on Saturday. We had done some work on the former before we finished work in Japan and have been finessing that presentation these last couple of days. Which is a good thing, because June contains at least 12 more official or casual engagements.

Possibly the biggest challenge of this home assignment is making sure we take time to rest, especially because we don't have much transition time at the other end either: within 24 hours of our last speaking engagement we'll be on a plane and within a couple of days we'll both be back at work in Japan. 

It's definitely not what I would advise a younger colleague to do. 

While I'm in Australia I'm still carrying some responsibilities from Japan. This morning I was emailing with our magazine team and this afternoon I have a 90-minute meeting with a new OMF team in Japan and David's keeping his eye on school and OMF emails also, hoping that nothing major arises. 

We're used to a fairly regular 8–5, Monday to Friday routine. Home assignment always challenges that, with weekends and evenings being the most common time we're officially "on the job".

Thankfully we have two weeks of holiday organised in the middle of all this craziness, much needed breaks!

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying slower mornings (not up at 6 am most mornings like we are in Japan), more time with my husband, and more flexible time to spend with friends and family. And time to absorb the Australian ambiance on a front verandah!

This last week before HA

 This week is all about getting as much of our regular work finished as far ahead as possible. I've been doing these things this week:

• The final stages of the Summer magazine: answering questions from our designer, checking proofreading of individual articles, and hopefully before next Wednesday we'll be looking at proofreading the whole magazine (the last step before going to print).
• Deciding things about the writer's retreat I'm running in October so that I can get a save-the-date email out this month. (Exciting!)
• Writing two articles for the Autumn issue of the magazine (due end of May).
• Writing and editing OMF Japan social media posts for the coming months.
• Starting to think about the OMF Japan field conference (June 2027): I'm part of the organising work group.
• Doing the admin necessary for the editing stage of the Autumn issue: so editors and fact checkers know what articles they are responsible for and due dates.

I am starting to think about what clothes I'll pack in my suitcase...11 weeks is not a short time, but neither is it a long time. Thankfully most people will only see us a couple of times, so it doesn't matter if I don't have a lot of variation in my suitcase.

I've also been juggling my schedule to try to fit in various things in these last days: drop off my plants at a friend's house, get my hair cut, practise the piano for Sunday, drop our keys off with colleagues, and a couple of last-minute additions of conference working group meetings. And a couple of not essentials, but nice to fit them in because I have time: time for writing another chapter of my book and time to ride to the park. It's actually pretty chill, quite a bit more so than when we've done this in the past with children!

And then I ran out of time to write this because the the "whole-mag proof" landed and I'm deep into proofreading again...