Home-sick/less

Side Note: I’ve come to terms with Team USA and Korea’s recent losses in the final 16-stage games, and now all I feel is pride. I am so proud of Team USA and Korea. Both teams came ready to fight with the big boys and by getting out of group stage, they’ve proven to the world that football is only getting better in both countries. In another 3 or 4 World Cups, those football giants better watch out! We’re coming for the title! =)

Real entry starts here:

This is what a typical night at our apartment has been like recently.

It’s dark. Quiet except for the comforting mumbling of our laundry machine. That familiar bluish glow from a TV radiates our faces as a World Cup match replays on low volume. It’s winter here so blankets cover our legs. Two ice cream bowls sit on our coffee table, waiting to be washed. Dan and I have our PC and Mac notebooks on our laps. We’re warm, well-fed, worn out from a full day of ministry, comfortable in the silence, and happy to be in our new apartment in Sydney when Dan says, “Oh look! Kim’s posted some more photos of the kids!” I rush to log into my facebook account on my laptop, click open my web feed and hurriedly look around for photos of my nephews and nieces. Found it! The oohs and aahs begin as we both wonder at how adorable our nieces and nephews are, how much they’ve grown, how we wish we could see them, hold them, kiss them…

And then all that cozy comfort and contentedness we were just experiencing in our familial silence just a minute ago is gone and we wish we were home in Southern California. These new photos show that my little niece DaHyunee is learning to stand now. I watch a video of Natalie following her big brother’s taekwondo moves. Nicholas gives his special shy smile to the camera. Once we finish looking and commenting on the new photos we look back at the older ones. A video of Nicholas on the day Natalie comes home from the hospital. Photos of DaHyun when she was only 3 months old looking like a little tamale cocooned in her blankie. A pouty-faced Nathaniel in his hanbok at his dol.

Dan and I have been contending with homesickness. Mainly in the form of missing our nephews and nieces. But recently we’ve been working with our student ministry SOW and serving at a local soup kitchen in Sydney called Newtown Mission (http://www.newtownmission.org.au/dropin-centre). We wash dishes, serve hot meals, and sit and have coffee with the patrons who have come in for a free meal in a warm room.

Two friends tell me that they have Asperger’s. I’m thinking this is what keeps them from obtaining work and making money because otherwise they seem like perfectly nice gentlemen, if a little distracted and socially awkward. I talk AFL and literature with them. A transvestite sits and has a few laughs over tea and cakes with one of our female students. She/he tells the student that she/he taught ballet in North and South Korea at one point. Another lady sits across from me, but no matter how hard I try to start a conversation, she ignores me. She just wants to eat and leave. No eye contact. One man, as I’m serving him some pasta, rushes to explain that he once was working as an actor in Hollywood and almost married the President’s daughter, but instead got deported. It seems many of them can’t help but lie. And I wonder at how many may actually believe their own lies…how unclear their realities might be.

And though I don’t know how much of what they say might be true or false, as I look around the room at the 70 or so people sitting, talking, eating, keeping warm from the cold outside I think that these people are probably also aunties and uncles like Dan and myself. No doubt they have families. Somewhere. They surely had parents, maybe siblings. Perhaps they’ve been abandoned. Perhaps they’ve abandoned their own families. Maybe they’ve never experienced a safe family atmosphere and that’s why they’ve ended up on the streets with no family. But I’m sure most of them have brothers and sisters, if not spouses. And that got me thinking about the nephews and nieces they probably can’t visit, hug or kiss. Do their nieces and nephews know that their uncles and aunties have to come to Newtown to find warm food in Sydney’s cold winter? I doubt it.

It’s a strange feeling. I’m heartbroken at their lost-ness. Their state of being unloved and unwanted by the world, even their own families. And I’m also so thankful for my family who loves and cares for me still across an ocean. For my nieces and nephews who know “Auntie Theresa and Uncle Dan live in Australia… with kangaroos~~~”

I won’t end this entry by simply saying these experiences at Newtown have given me “food for thought”. It’s much more than that. I don’t “know” a single one of those patrons who came to Newtown for lunch, but they’ve all reminded me of how desperately the world needs Christ…which only leads me to consider how urgently believers need to become Christ-ians, followers, and more importantly, imitators of Christ.

Christ said, “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” And His life is a testimony to how the unchurched world responds to such an invitation, to such love. Because the people who need Christ the most often don’t think to walk through the doors of a church. Sometimes you have to meet them where they are.