I am honored to be posting over at A Life Overseas today. This blog is a tremendous resource for those of you living and working overseas, so if you haven’t yet found it, you’re in for a treat. To be asked to guest-post for this blog felt like I was given a gift with a huge bow on top!
From the blog: The blog collective ‘A Life Overseas’ provides that place of online connection for Christ-following missionaries and humanitarian aid workers living in foreign countries– from the past, present, or future. As a team of writers who have logged years of overseas experience ourselves, we want to create an online space where expats of many nations come together to interact, encourage, and find a community that ‘gets it’.
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I’ve included an excerpt from the post here:
One week ago we said goodbye to my younger brother and his wife beside a ferry boat in Istanbul. In the grand scheme of goodbyes, this was surely not the hardest, but it still stung.
Making it more difficult – another brother and his wife arrived from Kazakhstan and Cyprus and we had an unexpected family reunion. We collectively decided Turkey is an excellent place for a family reunion.
We arrived on a grey, chilly Saturday afternoon and drank sahlep on the banks of the Bosphorous before catching a ferry to the Asian side of Istanbul. Our first meal held the magic of a crowded shopping area, a soccer game between warring teams viewed on a television perched high above the crowd, and kebabs that filled the mouth with tastes of the Middle East. Every day was filled with belonging and connection. And then it was over. We had to say goodbye.
Read more over at A Life Overseas – ‘I Don’t Do Goodbye’
Make sure you take a look through that blog as you won’t be disappointed with writers like Rachel Pieh Jones and Tara Livesay – two people who live what they write and more.
Related articles
- The Bittersweet Taste of the Words Goodbye (Communicating Across Boundaries)
- Goodbye – God Be With You
- Parties & Packing: A Moving Manifesto
- Settling & Surviving: The Arrival Manifesto
Marilyn R. Gardner 
Hi Marilyn,
My name is Angie Washington and I am on the editorial team at A Life Overseas. You voice is a gift to the world. We really appreciate your heartfelt contribution to the site.
God bless!
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how hard it must have been for your parents to stay resolved and hear you sob. I hated goodbyes too. They made bile rise up from my stomach the whole way to the SDAs where the bus waited in Pindi. Sometimes I still am reminded of that horrible sinking feeling we used to get a week before we left for boarding, that sick feeling that time was slowly running out and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it.
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I say good-bye to family and friends regularly and to my husband every other week when he comes home. I too focus on when I will see them next, as that takes the sting out of good-bye and the anticipation into the “Hi – we’re home” – or “Hi sweetie, it’s so good to see you and so glad you’re home”…. This coming weekend will include all of the above as we drive “home” to Canada to see family for the weekend, then have to say “see you later” to leave to return to “our home” in the US. Then the next morning it will be “good-bye” to my husband for 9 days with our next meeting in the Seatle airport. We meet and and say good-bye at airports every week. Then it’s the countdown til next time…. AS of today, it’s 5 more sleeps til reunion and then 5 sleeps til departure. Arrival and departures are just the way it has to be for now. But someday, if God allows, we can be together 365. The phone and internet make it so much easier than it was when you went to boarding school Marilyn or when I went off to college thousands of miles away in a different country. The hope we have of course is that even if death should part us, we will see our loved ones again in glory. Not quite ready for that separation from my new husband yet.
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Marilyn, it’s about all the memories between “Hello” and “Goodbye” that make “parting such sweet sorrow.”
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Yes! So true. It’s called a Holy Ache I think
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