Home. We have all heard the clichés. “Home is where the heart is.” “Home is where you hang your hat.” “Home is where the people you love are.” The list goes on and on. For returning long-term missionaries, the concept of “home” is strange. In school, we were told that these people do not feel “at home” in the culture they are living in (not their culture) or coming from (culture has changed while they have been gone). The closest these foreign emissaries come to feeling “at home” is on the airplane. So when we knew we were coming back to the US, we picked the brains Dan McVey, long-time missionary in Ghana. He said that it would probably take 6 months for every year we were out of the country to fully readjust to the US way of life if we ever did. Surprisingly, our family has had a much easier time readjusting to life in America than anticipated. Much of this has to do with being with His people on a regular basis.
In some ways, Christians are foreign missionaries in the culture in which they live even if they have never left their childhood stomping grounds.
Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation. 1 Peter 2:11-12
Peter does not attempt to hide the fact that Christians are a different breed from those around them. In fact, he further addresses the awkwardness the brethren will experience when dealing with those they once called friends and associates.
In all this, they are surprised that you do not run with them into the same excesses of dissipation, and they malign you; but they will give account to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. 1 Peter 4:4-5
On our own, we are not better than the non-believers around us. We have been made different by the blood of Christ. As we serve Him, we should notice that we are not the same people we once were. We do not fit in as we once did. Our perspectives have changed. We are no longer slaves of sin but are slaves to God as Paul puts it in Romans 6. Jesus would have it no other way if we truly want to serve Him.
If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. -Luke 9:23-26
All these things considered, there’s no wonder why a missionary feels most at home on the airplane. They are in transit. They know as all Christians should know that they do not belong here. After all, Christians are “aliens and strangers.”