OMF Family

Our adopted family: OMF.

I realised after I posted my blog post yesterday that it was quite objective and didn't tell you how much I appreciate being together with my OMF colleagues.

They are more than colleagues, really, they are more like the family you have when you don't have your family nearby. In some ways we're closer to some OMFers than we are to some members of our own family, because we have a similar faith and goals in life. We've all experienced the challenges of living in a foreign land away from our blood-families and our close friends, these shared experiences draw us together.

OMF originally stood for Overseas Missionary Fellowship. It is the Fellowship part of that that is important here. This isn't just an organisation that helps us get where we want to go or helps us stay here, it is a group with shared interests, and interested in supporting and caring for one another. I wrote a little more about the family nature of OMF here a month after the earthquake two years ago.

We've seen something of how the OMF family works in the last couple of weeks. Last week a couple in the OMF Japan "family" lost their baby, in the womb. The couple live a long way from any other OMFers in a rural part of Hokkaido, but the OMF family rose to the occasion, some drove today to the funeral. Being there when blood-family couldn't be there.

We've not experience anything close to that kind of grief, but we know what it is to have caring OMF family around us at times of difficulty. We wouldn't be without them.