An International Move
The first time we moved our children internationally, my oldest was almost three and my middle one was a chubby-cheeked eight-month-old baby. We were moving our family to my birth country.
Moving back to my home country didn’t require a lot of bureaucracy. We didn’t have to worry about visa applications for permanent residency or overstaying our welcome. It was my children’s and my right as Honduran citizens to reside in Honduran territory for as long as we wanted. We only needed our passports and my ID.
Then, after seven years of living in rural Honduras and adding a Honduran-born boy to our family, a series of circumstances, and God’s guidance, we move back to the United States. By then, my kids were nine, six and almost three. Once again, the only thing we needed to re-enter the US was a valid passport. In that sense, it was easy-peasy. We had the right as US citizens to enter US territory without fear of being denied entry.
By then, we had moved twice to and from our two passport countries; and in both instances, we gained a lot, but also experienced a lot of losses.
The truth is that any kind of change, like moving, even if it’s one neighborhood away, creates a lot of stress in a child’s life. How much more so moving internationally?
Soon, my kids will experience their third international move at ages 18, 15 and 11. But this time, our move is to a completely foreign country, on a different continent, with a foreign language, a different alphabet script, a different majority religion, and a people who think and look different from us. We will be the expats, the foreigners, the immigrant, the other. I have carried all these identities back and forth from my passport countries sometimes as a badge of honor and sometimes as a badge of shame.
As immigrants, we will swim in the waters of dependance. Like a baby saying goodbye to mom on its first day of day care, all the newness of change will fill us with wonder, curiosity, joy, grief, confusion and fear. We will ache to go back to what feels and looks safe. And we will need a lot of help making our new environment a safe place. Like little children, we’ll be needy and dependent, something that is counter-cultural to us, independent, self-sufficient westerners.
Even before that, we’ll need government permission to enter their nation and walk on their soil without fear of being kicked out. There is and will be a lot to plan, prepare, ask and do mentally, spiritually and legally for us to walk out of the airplane, into the airport terminal gate and through immigration as welcomed guests in our host country.
It will be a new season on reliance and dependance on our God, the One who sees us in our neediness; the One who calls himself Jehovah, the I Am, the dependable and faithful God who desires our full trust. May we trust him to provide all that we need as we rely on him.
Isaiah 50:10 (AMP)
10 Who is among you who [reverently] fears the Lord, who obeys the voice of His Servant, yet who walks in darkness and deep trouble and has no shining splendor [in his heart]? Let him rely on, trust in, and be confident in the name of the Lord, and let him lean upon and be supported by his God.
