My Problem

"My problem is that I'm twenty-three years old and I've already had the experience of a lifetime."

Young foreign aid worker returning to passport country after two years in Colombia.

Re-Entry

"When I go back I know I shall be out of it; we fellows who've spent our lives out here always are."

Somerset Maugham The Gentleman in the Parlour

Adaptability

"Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation."

Mohandas Gandhi

Closure

"Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art of ending."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend."

Shakespeare

Ruth Van Reken's Article on Obama's TCK Team

Look at this interesting article on Obama's selection of TCKs...

MK Prayer

Father God,

You have planted us in soil far from our ancestral homes. You have asked us to walk your map and you have led us around the world and back again. We have seen your hand at work and we have felt your presence: in Venezuela, in China, in Indonesia, in Papua New Guinea, in Guatemala, in Japan. We have seen our parents follow your compass and chart their lives by your maps. We thank you for your presence and for your provision. Even as we are grateful we ask for your mercy.

Father God, we, missionary kids from every tribe and culture ask for your comfort. Would you enlarge our hearts to encompass the loss we have experienced? Would you comfort us and remind us of your presence as we say goodbye to friends and family, countries and cultures. We are weary of goodbyes. Sometimes we are weary of hellos.

Would you please draw near to us as we bear witness to a world in turmoil and darkness. We so often inhabit the last outpost,the "last homely house", the no man's land between the light and the pit. We have seen much and experienced much and the scars are on our hearts. Would you please release your healing on eyes that have seen too much too young, on tired and wounded hearts?

Precious Father, most importantly, would you daily remind us of who we are? Please root us in Yourself. Remind us that we find our identity in You alone and in the knowledge that we are strangers and aliens on this planet, passing through and on our way HOME.

Father God please use us for your Kingdom, as your Bridge People, as Restorers of the broken and the fragmented, as your Peacemakers, as those who offer your Comfort and your Healing. Please use our many languages, our many relationships, our longing for adventure, our love and respect for culture and for difference, our passion for the dark and forgotten places on this planet, our heart for the underdog and the marginalized. Please show us how to use our heritage for your purpose, for your kingdom. May it come quickly!!!

Amen

This short film was created by a TCK and does a great job of showing the complicated cultural bridging that a TCK must do to form a cohesive identity. It is GREAT!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfOtZ0Fp1-U

Garden of Exotic Gifts

"To children who successfully navigate a lifetime of change, the world is a garden of exotic gifts, a house of treasures to explore and take in. Transferred from place to place, young and porous, they collect and absorb experiences, their personalities amalgams of those cultures they internalize and claim as their own. Perched for a while in a new environment, they experience each move as an occasion for growth, a chance to blossom in new ways.
These children see the world in all its richness and variety. Theirs is a privileged life, filled with opportunities to extend and enhance their knowledge of the earth and its people. Bilingual or even multilingual at an early age , immersed in an interrelated, interdependent world community, they are able to enjoy a broader and more mature perspective than many of their more rooted peers. Theirs is a global education. Though they may regret the loss of a unifying tradition or history, they are grateful for the variety of experiences to which they have been exposed."

Unrooted Childhoods- Memoirs of Growing Up Global
Faith Eidse and Nina Sichel

Ahh.....Re-Entry

"My advice about coming home? Don't."
Japanese businessman

Boundary States

" Transformation is the true destination of transition, whether it occurs in a myth or in an individual's everyday life. How transition does that is a mystery, but it somehow involves being in a boundary state, where you spend time near a boundary between one state and another, or one life-phase and the next. The borders of Oz are everywhere, although the price of passage to the other side is often nothing less than your life- at least your life as you have known it. "
The Way Of Transition- William Bridges

" Boundary surfaces are everywhere the places where living formative processes can find a hold; be it in cell membranes, surfaces of contact between cells, where life forces are mysteriously present; in the great boundary surfaces between the current systems of the oceans, where various currents flow past each other in different directions- these are known to be particularly rich in fish; or at the infinitely extensive surfaces of the natural and artificial filter systems of the earth, where the water seeping through is purified and given back its vital qualities."
Theodore Schwenck

" Life never presents us with anything which may not be looked upon as a fresh starting point, no less than as a termination."
Andre Gide

Heritage

Critical to the development of an MK's identity is an awareness and acknowledgement of our spiritual heritage. One remarkable member of our tribe is the late Ruth Bell Graham, evengelist Billy Graham's wife. Ruth was a missionary kid to China and attended boarding school in North Korea. She re-entered the U.S. to attend Wheaton College where she met Billy Graham. They married and had five children. Ruth credited her sacrifical sharing of her husband ( with the world!)to her heart for the lost which was kindled at a very early age in China. Ruth's faith sustained her during her long separations from her husband. The poem below shows the depth of her character and her awareness of her identity in Christ as she departs China for the U.S. to attend college:

Test me, Lord, and give me strength
to meet each test
unflinching, unafraid;
not striving nervously to do my best,
not self-assured, or careless as in jest,
but with Your aid.

Purge me, Lord, and give me grace
to bear the heat
of cleansing flame;
not bitter at my lowly lot, but meet
to bear my share of suffering and keep sweet,
in Jesus' Name.

Ruth Bell Graham
Aboard the S.S. President McKinley, leaving China for college in America. 1937

Perpetuating Marginality

More from Mary Edwards Wertsch:

"....military brats spend a great deal more of their childhoods on the outside looking in than on the inside looking out.....Standing on the sidelines observing other people's in-groups becomes a way of life- and the outsider way of life that was forced by circumstance during childhood is then perpetuated into adulthood by military brats who know no other way to be....While it is hard to perpetually live the outsider role, it is harder still to abandon it. The outsider role is the central paradox of a military brat's life. A sense of belonging is our single greatest need and our single greatest quest- yet many military brats perpetuate their own marginality by making choices that are guaranteed to keep them on the outside."

Psychological Diaspora

Mary Edwards Wertsch, a TCK/military brat who authored the landmark study," Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress", writes about belonging and loss in this excerpt from her essay, entitled, "Outside Looking In":

"The first legacy of military childhood transience is what might be called the psychological diaspora. As adults most of us manage to slow or stop the moving- and yet still we find ourselves caught up in a strange migration. It is a migration of the soul, all the more mysterious to us because it has no clear origin and no certain goal.
There is only one antidote to the angst of the diaspora. Belonging. It is not easy for a military brat to learn what that even means, much less to find it. Yet belonging is the single greatest quest of our lives, a quest that lives in many of us as a powerful unnamed yearning.
My feeling is that it is crucial for military brats to put the right name to this yearning, face our unrequited need to belong, and address it as best we can.... Another corollary seems to be that for military brats, a prerequisite to belonging is grieving over not belonging and repeated loss. That stands to reason: it is necessary to break down the old immunity before one can become attached to something new. And belonging, more than anything else, is about attachment."