Paying the cost of returning to Japan

It was a beautiful wedding.

This time last week we were in the air. Wow! Today I vacuumed our house, cleaned toilets, and baked bread. We've achieved a lot in a week in terms of getting settled. Helped, of course, by the fact that we really hadn't moved out of our Tokyo house. The ten days before we left Australia also contained a lot, especially a lot of goodbyes.

Wedding
On New Year's Eve we said farewell to my parents (and their home, a place that they've lived since I was 15, but may not live there much longer, hence I was saying goodbye to that place quietly in my head). Then drove 45 minutes to the wedding of a girl who was a baby at my 21st birthday party. She's the daughter of a friend I've known my whole life (here's a post I wrote eight years ago about this special friendship). 

My lifelong friend Melina, mother of the bride.

The whole wedding was held on my friend's property, a rural block far enough from the city that you could see many stars. The reception extended into the night and we were treated with fireworks at 9.30pm. It's the first time our boys have been to a wedding as teenagers, so it was a cultural experience for them.

Fairyland in a tin shed!

We stayed that night nearby at the home of relatives of the bride, actually someone I walked down the aisle with when I was my friend's bridesmaid! The next day on the way back to Ipswich we stopped by my friends' house to say goodbye. As adults we've never lived in the same town and are used to long absences. But it doesn't mean that I don't grieve that I don't get to spend more time with this precious friend.

On New Year's Day we went back to our house in Ipswich and spent the next several days packing up and moving out of our house. We are thankful for friends and church members who helped us with this, especially our home church's pastor who did several trips locally with his trailer and lent us his car and trailer for a longer trip on Saturday. He and his wife also hosted us in their house (with our 10 suitcases) over the weekend.

Church
We took a break from moving on the Sunday and instead had a very social day. Our farewell service (also called our re-commissioning service) at church in the morning and said farewell afterwards to a lot of people one-by-one, including one lady who completely broke down in my arms. Then we attended a reunion/farewell with some old friends for a late lunch.

My parents and another couple who've known me my whole life (whose granddaughter had just gotten married) came to church with us—it was wonderful to have them there. Saying goodbye to my parents is never easy, but we managed it without falling apart completely.

Farewell to this house, which has been a
great base during our six-months.

So many goodbyes. I was exhausted by the end of the day.

Special friends
On Monday morning I met another special friend for coffee to say goodbye. Then after lunch and a couple of small errands we were free to say farewell to Ipswich, the place that's been home for the last six months. We drove to a hotel near Brisbane airport and dropped off our suitcases, then headed to coast for a special gathering of close friends.

I'm not sure how much I can write here about this gathering, I don't want to infringe upon my friends' privacy. Suffice to say that these are also precious friends and it was an unexpected opportunity to meet them all together. The ladies and I have been supporting one another in an online chat group through some really tough things over the last few months. I'm incredibly grateful for their friendships and incredibly sad that we have moved away from where they are both located. The night, of course, ended too soon, and this marked the final farewells. 

Son
Unless, of course, you count our eldest son. He joined us on the Tuesday for a movie and dinner and then we said our last goodbye to him on Australian soil for a while. He's coming in ten days to visit us here, but it was still sad that our time with him in Australia was over.

Recognising loss
In the past I'd have just shoved all this under the carpet and moved on, but I've learnt as I've grown older that recognising all these goodbyes is important to remaining healthy. That was confirmed again this morning by this article a friend sent me. In it the author says that it's not just the big losses that we need to recognised, the small ones count too, though I wouldn't say that saying goodbye to all the above friends in a matter of a few days is a small thing.

But all of us should take time to think about the things we have lost, recognise them and grieve appropriately rather than spend our lives in denial. David rightly said “I will not give God something that cost me nothing.” (2 Samuel 24:24). Recognising and mourning the loss helps us to give God something of value, rather than something that wasn’t important to us anyway.