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Home is a complicated word for TCKs. Me too.

I wrote two weeks ago about how I left my home to fly to my mountain – another home for my heart. I spent just a couple of days in Portland before taking a red eye out to Chicago where a piece of home picked me up and drove me to Wheaton. I’d scheduled the playlist because I knew that week would be absolute madness.

I’ll regularly tell people that Nathan is the best humanity has to offer, and his generous agreement without hesitation to not only pick me up from the airport at 7am but to include a coffee as part of the deal is unparalleled. I was so excited to see this precious child and hear how he is doing while having a face to face conversation and enjoying a delicious brunch together. He dropped me at the Wheaton dorm where I wheeled in to greet Brittany for the first time in nearly a decade. I knew I’d see a lot of familiar faces as I spent the week at orientation, so I was excited to greet Givorgy, but I got extra excited to see CJ who I hadn’t expected to be at Orientation. I was immediately disappointed to discover he’d left his wife and child in Germany, but I forgave him as I still get photo updates from Jenna of their baby girl. The next face I recognised around the couches with those two was Lindsay, and I was so excited to greet her in person because after nearly two years of working together remotely, this was the first time we’d been face to face.

In fact, this was the first time I met any of the TeachBeyond TCK Care team in person despite our regular calls that have developed a great rapport as we establish this team. I was so excited to see all of them in person and put a whole personality to the screen representation I’ve been working with.

Jeff and I were running the teen program together, and I was excited to work alongside this guy who is wholeheartedly passionate about Jesus and TCKs. It was an exhausting week of full long days, but my team (mostly Jeff) generously pushed me around the hilly Wheaton campus to make sure I could be fully involved in the program (and fed). I should note that the Wheaton campus is far from independently accessible for a wheelchair user, and I’ve subsequently discovered that they at least do theoretically have better accessible housing than the dorm I was in which was quite a struggle to live in for the week. Fortunately, the effort was worth it to connect with these coworkers and TCKs in person. Not only did I get to serve alongside my TCK team, but I got to be in person with my regional supervisor for the first time. Just like with Lindsay, I felt almost instantly connected to and supported by Tosca, so getting to watch her interact with our new regional members and celebrate the work God is doing across East Asia/Oceania while also sneaking in a one on one to share more personal stuff with her was a real treat.

I even got a lunch with Howard who has played a key role in my story as advocate from day one when I had my accident to speaking up for my secondment to New Zealand and assignment to the TCK care team. Snuck in after TCK Care days and testimony time in the evenings, I managed to see a few friends from Germany who happened to be close enough to make a hug happen. First, Rich and Carol came to catch up at the end of my first day before they flew home to the east coast, and I can’t tell you how much I loved having just half an hour with these people who have adopted me into their family and kept me close for twelve years now. Another twelve year connection came a couple of nights later as Christine spent a few hours catching up with me in the dorm we met in. It was wild to reminisce about how we’d been assigned as roommates at our own orientation twelve years ago and decided to be friends because we both like Pitch Perfect to six months later when she was speaking to doctors in Switzerland on my behalf while I was in surgery. I’m so grateful for Christine in my life, and what a sweet gift to actually sit face to face with her again after a seven year hiatus on in person conversation.

I squeezed in one other non-TeachByeond BFA friend for a lunch break while also managing to catch a few moments with people I’d met over the years of service on different continents. I loved getting to share my book with some of them and talk about how God has been faithful across the wild stories we have that intersected through TeachBeyond. I laughed with a woman who crammed my wheelchair into her daughter’s Fiesta for a visa renewal trip in Germany, and I hugged the father of one of my former housemates at the Friday dedication service. There were countless beautiful expected and unexpected reunions and new meetings. I’m so excited to send a care package to a group of fresh TCKs moving to my region soon. I’ve already got requests for hokey pokey chocolate from New Zealand – wait until they try Squiggles!

One of the teenagers who is moving organisations ended up volunteering to push me across campus as we trekked from the science building to the CS Lewis museum. He’d grown up in the Philippines, not far from where my dad spent a brief period as a teenager, and I was sharing about how I was headed to see my nephews for the first time in three years. He asked how old they were and perked up, “That’s my age!” when I shared how old Wyatt is. I’m glad he couldn’t see my face as I processed the fact that I was landing in Colorado to find my nephew a full blown teenager. Somehow he’d stayed a kid in my mind despite the fact his age kept increasing.

Since I only had four days in Colorado, I only got a brief interaction with both my nephews as I crammed in a grandpa, two grandmas, a pair of aunts and uncles, four cousins, my sister and her husband, plus the two nephews who keep aging without me. Not only that, but I was able to go up to my sending church in Denver and share a bit with the congregation, many of whom had never met me. For the past three years, I’ve been a name on the missionary wall to half of ECBC after The Embassy married Denver Christian Bible Church and became a new home for me. Even though I’ve never been a regular attender of this congregation, I was hugged by loads of people and felt so deeply known and loved when Brandon told me “welcome home.” Home is people who know your story and love you through the ups and downs.

My last night in Colorado, I went out to trivia night at a pub with my two youngest cousins. Nate and I figured it was probably at least fifteen years since we’d seen each other in person. As Sarah and I reflected on the car ride home, we talked about how we didn’t have what you’d call a close relationship having grown up a time zone apart and now living a hemisphere apart. Even so, Sarah’s like home to me. Maybe because we’re family, but maybe because we like each other enough to have a heart connection even when it’s separated by thousands of miles and an ocean to boot and will just be open with each other when we are in person.

My parents drove me up to Denver Airport via a loop through the Garden of the Gods, so I snapped a photo of the clear Kissing Camels as I said goodbye to the red rocks for now. I’m writing this now while I’m on my layover in LAX enjoying the generosity of strangers. I seriously have the wildest life. I’ll post this once I land back home after more of my home people pick me up and drive me to my house, and I can’t express how grateful I am to have a list of people I can ask for a ride in so many cities, but especially to have someone welcome me home after this kind of long exhausting trip. So what about this in-between while I travel to home and God gives me a gift of a stranger on my Denver to LA flight striking up a conversation during the plane’s descent and offering me a guest pass to the Qantas business lounge because we’re on the same connecting flight to Sydney? Who makes this stuff up?

I don’t have another filter than “God thing” for the chance to sit with my feet up and have some nice food and drink and a cleaner bathroom for a couple of hours rather than being deposited like cargo at the next gate without access to any of those basic needs. Traveling by myself is incredibly difficult, but God gave me this kind stranger to offer his guest pass so that I didn’t have to be stuck in that terrible dual discomfort of dehydrated and needing to pee until time for boarding. As much as disability sucks, I know that I’m so loved and so cared for every step of the way.

One last wild connection I managed to make on this trip was to have lunch with my former student Jacob who’s doing an internship at a church in Colorado Springs. I combined it with lunch with a couple of other friends from other countries which was a fun twist, but Jacob is the kid who told me he felt like I was going to be healed on a Thursday. Jacob is a kid who’s prayed for me for years. Jacob is a kid who lives the faithfulness of God through wild circumstances. To hug him on another continent and hear him say on a Monday afternoon that it felt like a Wednesday in his soul was an important reminder that the Holy Spirit works across time zones and country borders and is still overseeing the story of my life.

I’m home everywhere I go when I have the Holy Spirit.