You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello


Yesterday was a day of opposites, opposite emotions, opposite transitions, and opposite realities.  In one afternoon, I helped the women of our school community host a baby shower for a newly arrived expectant mother and I went to a goodbye dinner that marked the end of a season for a longstanding friendship (which coincidentally was with another expectant mother).  The day held so many emotions, so many opposites, and so many similarities. 

First came the baby shower where we enthusiastically welcomed a new woman into our community and celebrated with her the new life that she is about to welcome into the world.  Expat women make friends more quickly than any I have ever seen.  Time is fleeting as we are well aware and relationships in this type of setting are in continual transition.  We have all been new at some point and we will all be new again somewhere someday, so we know the value of being welcomed with open arms into a community of people that will become your short-term family in many ways.  This is especially true of an expectant mom who will deliver a new life into the world in a place far from home and natural family.  Having other women to come along and offer help and support is invaluable.  I love how quickly these ladies rise to the challenge.  Our new friend has been here for less than a month and several of them hadn’t even met her before the shower, but that didn’t stop them from enthusiastically planning and contributing.  What a sweet joy.

After the baby shower wrapped up, I went with my family to pick up our friends and go to dinner for one last time.  Theses friends are the last of an era for us.   They are among the very last of the group of friends that we made when we first moved to this spot.  We have enjoyed a friendship that has crossed many years, many transitions, and many milestones.  They started off as acquaintances, became friends, and finally became family in Christ to us.  Their faces hold memories of soccer games, soup parties, Christmas parties, beach days, and precious times of worship together.  They represent the best of an expat life and the best of the body of Christ all wrapped into one for us.  They are also expecting a baby and will welcome it in a new home, with a new job, new friends, and a new church family.  We ache to miss the arrival of that baby.  We have prayed for it long and hard and we love it already.  We will be watching our phones for news of their joy, but how bittersweet not to be able to hold him or hug his parents.   I hate goodbyes, they always bring with them a loss.  




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Our human condition is so tied up in this struggle between the joy of life and the sorrow of loss.  Days like yesterday provide a clear reflection of just how quickly we can pass through those differing emotions.  Motherhood provides almost daily opportunities for this paradox.  Both my new friend and my old friend will experience that time and time again as they love these precious babes.  And for now we are suspended like this, living a redeemed life in a broken world.  We can truly feel the joy of love because of the life of Christ in us.  But we deeply ache with loss after loss because of the brokenness of the world around us and in us.  It points us to our future hope and causes us to echo the Apostle Paul who said in Romans 8, that “all creation groans inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.  For in this hope we were saved.  Now hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what he sees?  But it we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”  I’m not sure that I wait for it with patience every day.  Some days I wait for it impatiently.  But I know it’s coming.  I can feel it in my bones and I read it in my Bible.  We won’t always be stuck in limbo, someday our emotions will be fixed on joy.  The losses will be done and we will lay them at His feet counting them as nothing for the joy of being with Him. 


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