The mission family...

When you live overseas like this, away from "family" then so many people become your family. All the missionaries are Aunt Jane and Uncle Bob to the kids. The missionaries you serve alongside are like big brothers and sister (ok, someday soon, maybe there will be some younger ones that will feel like my "little" brothers and sisters! but I still seem to be the baby, as I always have been, in the family). This is truely a beautiful thing! This type of family is priceless and precious. Something about sharing the same calling, the same desire to reach the same lost people, sharing the same frustration with a foreign culture, sharing the same joys and struggles with language and cultural barriers, understanding why you pointed to your nose instead of your chest when refering to yourself, or why you can never remember certain English words anymore, being able to throw in foreign words without a pause in the flow of your conversation, sharing a life that is sometimes so impossible to understand for those who've never been "here". It makes being on the field even more of a blessing, and makes it easier.

But the hardest part about it is, missionaries are often in motion. Going home for a year, or 6 months, or so. Moving to another city to start a new ministry or church plant. Leaving the field...

I found out today that some of my mission family members are leaving Japan. We haven't lived very near one another for a long while. We rarely ever see each other. But there is just something about knowing they are in the same country that makes them still feel close. When an ocean seperates you, even though the email still works the same, and the phone can be just as easily picked up, there is just something so distant about that. An ocean. A different country. Another continent. Family...

Japan seems a little lonlier tonight, just thinking about more precious family moving away.

I am so blessed to know some of the most incredible missionaries in the world, who've devoted years of their life to bringing the Gospel to one of the most difficult nations to evanglize in the World. Precious, precious people.

MY family!