October 6, 2009

Dear Friends,

Leigh, Lily, David, Harrison, David and Peter Knauert in Highland Park, New Jersey, enjoying the hospitality of seminary friends.

Greetings from Potomac, Maryland—far away from Brazil, but convenient enough for undertaking the task of securing a Brazilian visa. The occasion of waiting has set me to thinking about transitions: how they feel, who undergoes them, their optimal length, and so on. It’s a topic we have dwelled on at length as a family, probably a typical preoccupation for people moving from Durham, North Carolina to São Paulo, Brazil.

In our family of six, we grown-ups have most often kept the issue of transition one degree removed from ourselves. “The kids,” we worried with our peers, “will have to adjust to a new language, to urban ways of life, to sticking out in their classrooms.” At the beginning anyway, that’s what we were saying, and that’s the main way we thought about transition and the impending move to São Paulo. Make no mistake, what our kids left behind was not and still is not a gentle topic (as they have reminded us more than once). If anything, we underestimated by a long shot how fiercely they loved their friends, their teachers, their house, their city, their pastor.

Since these early ruminations, a lot has happened, but one crucial thing has not. We sold our house in June and have been on the move ever since. At one point Leigh and I tried to count the beds we’d slept in—21 if I rightly recall—but by now we’ve stopped keeping track. The thing that hasn’t happened, as I already mentioned: we are not in Brazil. I write this first letter, in fact, from the very bedroom I grew up in. All of which brings me to my more recent thoughts about transitions, the way they are likely to frustrate our preconceived notions. “Do not boast about tomorrow,” Proverbs reminds us, “for you do not know what a day may bring.” It occurs to me that we are at no time in greater danger of forgetting this truth than when our visions of tomorrow begin to crystallize around notions of God’s work as exotic or extra-ordinary. At such times, God will send you back to your childhood bedroom and make you think long and hard about what it is to be a missionary.

In this more refined conceptualization of transition—transition as a period of waiting, of not-knowing, as the difficult de-investment from tomorrow—it is the kids who have taken the lead and persistently tried to give the grown-ups words of assurance. Like when Harrison offered the table prayer the other night: 

Thank you that Grandma keeps letting us stay at her house. And thank you for this long time to learn all the things we need to learn before we go to Brazil.

Twenty-one beds. Twenty-one families that have kept letting us stay at their houses and at their dinner tables. Twenty-one who have discommoded themselves to ensure we feel at home. Twenty-one who have asked about our call to Brazil: How can they help? How can they pray? It seems clear enough to Harrison that what we need to learn is how to own up to our deep dependence on neighborly hospitality. Once the grown-ups get that figured out, I guess we’ll be off to Brazil, having gotten used to the idea that we will receive from our partners far beyond what we can give.

Yours,

David and Leigh