Early home assignment plans for 2026

In the last few weeks we've been working on putting a new-to-us plan into action. We've spent 4 ½ years of the last 25 years on home assignment in Australia. It's a requirement of our organisation to periodically spend time in our passport country visiting supporters and supporting churches. Yep, we did that in 2004/2005, 2009/20010, 2014/2015, 2018, and 2023/2024. Three of those five times we packed up and moved out of our place in Japan. That adds up to a total of ten international moves.

The bookmark we gave people before we
left the first time for Japan

I've written here a lot about the strange institution of home assignment. If you've seen some of that you'll know that it's an exhausting, stressful, all consuming thing. The purpose behind it includes you getting rest in your passport country, but an awful lot of work goes into getting there to get that rest.

But I'm at risk here of not toeing the party line . . . Home assignments have numerous good things about them, including staying connected with family and friends. After our only six-month home assignment in 2018, I wrote a post pondering: Was it worth it? It was a difficult home assignment (we had two teenagers still at home, just for starters). The blog post was pretty brutally honest, but I did come up with some really good things that happened because we took the time to go to Australia.

The world is changing, though, and short home assignments these days are far more common than six- or twelve-month ones. And we're feeling quite jaded about these huge international moves. Now that we are in a season where we don't have to consider the schooling (or mental health) of our kids and it's just two of us moving around, we've decided to try out a short home assignment, one that will last 76 days, or just short of 11 weeks.

This has numerous benefits:

• we don't have to move out of our beautiful apartment in Tokyo (massive benefit, I hate moving)
• we don't have to find somewhere to rent in Australia or find a car (also massive benefit)
• the above two points means that moving between countries will be smoother with far less exhaustion and practical details needing to be arranged
• we have minimal handover to others for our jobs in Japan (also a huge benefit)

One of the downsides is that we'll be moving faster in Australia and have less rest there. We'll also have less time to spend with our home church, family, and friends.

So, I've been contacting our main supporting churches and getting some 'big rocks' in place. David's bought plane tickets and we've been communicating with key people. It's actually been amazing—since the start of the year the following things have fallen into place quite easily:

• dates to visit eight churches in Queensland and Western Australia
• places to stay throughout our visit
• cars to drive
• a place to have a holiday and a motorhome
• time to visit both sides of the family (and hope to see our granddaughter)

We're arriving in Brisbane on May 21 and then fly to Perth on July 24. Then onto Tokyo, arriving in the hottest, most humid part of the year on August 4.

Closer to the time we'll decide on some "open day" type events where people who live in SEQ and Toowoomba can meet up with us, rather than us racing around to see many people in such a short time.

But for now, we need to put our heads down and live here and now. This morning I've set aside for writing, especially putting time into a first draft of this book project I'm working on. So I'd best move onto that now...but I'm looking forward to seeing some of you who live in Queensland and Perth in a few months time.