On living far away ...

 

I've mentioned on here before that my brother recently came for a visit, and many of you have checked out his fabulous photos. (A few favorites at the end of this post.)  (His new camera--and the photos they produced--have made me want an SLR. But the first--and responsible!--step is to make sure I'm getting everything I can out of our current camera. And no, I haven't looked at the camera manual or even picked up the camera since Chip left....)

What I haven't said is how great it was to have him here, how much we enjoyed seeing Hong Kong through "new" eyes again, and how fun it was to see him play and interact with Finn. When I left him at the airport express check-in, my eyes unexpectedly filled up. It's not like I miss him in a daily way--we haven't lived in the same city for 15 years, except for a two year stint back in 2000-2002.  But I do wish we saw each other more than 2x a year, and I so wish that Finn could spend lots of time with him, to learn about all the things we won't teach him--like football, soccer, barbecue. 

This is the cost of living far away, and the dilemma of so many of our friends. Do you live in the place you love, the place with the perfect job and the landscape that speaks to you? Or do you choose to stay close to family, close to old friends, close to the people who can tell your children stories about when you were a child? How possible is it to maintain--and develop--relationships from across the country? Is skype enough?  

We now know many families who live oceans away from their roots, and many of these families have chosen this as their life, not just a two-year experience. They feel more-or-less confident in their decisions, and have settled on various ways of dealing with these overseas relationships, from month-long visits from grandparents to essentially forming new "extended families" here in Hong Kong. One family we know spends every summer in Canada at their lake place, which is next door to the grandparents'. 

 The forming of new "extended families" is, of course, something many people do, whether they live far from their actual families or not. I recently heard Luke Timothy Johnson, New Testament scholar, speak (on Speaking of Faith, of course!) on the ambiguity of the New Testament view towards families, and in fact he once gave a talk entitled "God doesn't like families."  This provocative title hammered home the point that Jesus called us to love deeply beyond our bloodlines, and to invest in a community wider than our usual associations.

He quotes a colleague of his, Luther Smith, as saying that "what the Bible seems to say about families is that they are necessary but not sufficient." The problem, he goes on to say, with the idolatrous position of making families all-sufficient is that then we lose "the prophetic edge of moving beyond family, moving beyond kinship into a larger world which is God's creation." 

And so this is the gift--and the call--of living far away right now. Of course, even here (especially here?) it's easy to focus on our little family of three, and feel sufficient unto ourselves. But as we are forced to look beyond family for the relationships that sustain us, we are striving to also keep our attention broad, to look for those lonelier than ourselves, to live fully in the larger world, as members of the human family.

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