Briefly reflecting on home assignment

Now it's over a month since we left Australia and officially we aren’t on home assignment anymore, so I want to put some brief thoughts down about how the year went. It’s not an uncommon question from people as we meet them again here. And depending on the context and time available, our replies vary in depth.

The street we called home for 12 months.

We had a good rest, ate good food, read a lot of books. We spent valuable time with family and friends and have so many precious memories.

It was a time of achieving some big audacious goals, particularly with our sons. And as we worked through achieving those goals there was a lot of work to actively seek God and trust him while we didn't know the outcomes of what we'd set out to achieve. I'm very thankful that we've been in a position to spend a year walking alongside our sons in their passport country as we all make this transition, and be paid to be there without changing who we work for. Not too many people who work outside their passport country could. (That's awkward writing...I hope you get my drift.)

It's the first time we've done home assignment without our kids being in school (in October I wrote about how this HA was different in several ways to any one we've done before). Our first HA, in 2004-2005 our eldest son was at school. It gave us much more freedom, but was also very weird not having that as a daily routine marker. In the past school terms is something that shaped when we did things, like visit our more distant family, so with so much choice, decision making was a little more difficult!

In February, almost six months ago, we entered the so called "empty nesting" years. That was not without challenge, but we also had a few "dry runs" earlier as we left our sons alone at home for weeks at a time. It was a significant achievement, given the rental situation in Australia right now, our income, the needs of our sons, and the specific dynamics in our family. In many ways doing this is counter cultural—many of our urban peers in Australia have their young adult children living with them well after high school. It is not counter cultural to most of our peers in the cross-cultural community, nor to those who live in rural areas of Australia (our family backgrounds). But these are supposed to be brief thoughts...I could probably write a whole blog post on this topic, so I'll move on.

We travelled a lot, I daren't even try to add up how many kilometres. Only two aeroplane trips (nearly four, but the trip to Melbourne just before we left didn't happen), but those were big flights: six hours to Perth on the other side of the continent. We drove, I think, ten different vehicles during the year, so an odometer reading won't help either. Long service leave (motorhome trip to Tasmania) was awesome, but if you've been reading my blog this year you've probably already read A LOT about that.

We had fewer churches to visit because various churches we used to have a relationship with either no longer exist, or no longer support us. It was a bit weird, but also nice, to not be in so many different churches (although long service leave took us away from our home church for an extended period). So overall we probably did less public speaking than we've done in the past. We did a couple of camps this time, as guest missionaries, which was fun, and exhausting.

It was good to be in Australia for many reasons, but no, it isn’t 100% home anymore. We missed Japan, although not with the intensity that we missed Australia in our first years in Japan. You might be interested to know that we ate relatively little Japanese food when we were in Australia.

We’re continuing to learn that home is the people. It’s where there are people we love and that is in both Australia and Japan. On both sides of the ocean we've had people "welcome us home". That statement is just too shallow to do this subject justice in any way.

It was good to step away from the intensity of our jobs here in Japan, we now come back to them with slightly different, and hopefully better, perspectives.

Just a few thoughts. It's good, in many ways, to be back in Japan. But it also feels like we've gone through the whole transition into "empty nesting" a second time! However, that's for another blog post.