A True Day in the Life
Those kinds of things are easy enough to hide when you have visitors. You take them to all the fun places and do all the fun things. You give them a tour of the very best your host country has to offer, introduce them to all your local friends and local spots, and give them a full “day in the life” experience.
But life happens. And life has a way of leaving us exposed.
There’s really nothing like airport pickups. They’re the most oxymoronic thing I can think of—one of the only places where utter excitement and razor-sharp anxiety can exist at the exact same moment. Eyes manically scan gaggles of freshly deplaned, duffle bag-laden people looking, searching, hoping for the ones you came to see, the ones who came to see you. Hearts leap at the sight of reunion after reunion, husbands running hazardously through busy crosswalks, sisters, brothers, and friends embracing and falling over carts and suitcases. All the while, we’re simultaneously aching in anticipation for our own reunions to walk through the door. Every minute feels stretched into eternity and every impossible scenario plays right alongside thoughts about what to say after having seen someone after so long and after they’ve traveled so very far to get here.
When our very own duffle bag-laden people arrived after we waited and watched for almost two hours as they made their inevitable shuffle through security and baggage claim, the angst that had been piling up drained. In its place, a giddy flutter ran right through me. I couldn’t make it around the rail to meet them fast enough. But once the hugs were through and the bags in the car, the novelty wore off and the anxiety set in. It was different than your typical airport-waiting-game anxiety, but one I'm willing to bet is a familiar plague among people living abroad who have friends or family or teams or churches or schools come to visit. It’s a fear that your way of life won’t be understood—because you don’t always understand it too well yourself.
I saw this coming. It happens every time someone comes from our old home to our now home. I worry they’ll take too close a look at our lives. I worry we’ll be exposed for the frauds we must be. I worry they’ll see we aren’t doing this right or living up to the hype we try to share in our monthly newsletters. I worry they’ll see us floundering and translate it as failing. I tried to prepare myself for it. I tried to pray the fears and worries away and asked God for the contentment I so wished to exude when they got here.
Life fluctuates here. Some days we feel on top of the world and on top of our game like we are being used in all the right ways and making the world a better place. And yet, there are also days where we can feel low and defeated, like nothing we are doing is working and like our time and talents are being wasted. Things can take sharp turns in the wrong direction and we can go from understanding and believing in our calling to questioning absolutely everything in front of us.
Those kinds of things are easy enough to hide when you have visitors. You take them to all the fun places and do all the fun things. You give them a tour of the very best your host country has to offer, introduce them to all your local friends and local spots, and give them a full “day in the life” experience.
But life happens. And life has a way of leaving us exposed.
Not two hours after we got home from the airport and unpacked all the goodies our visitors flew over with, our oldest started acting lethargic and off. She ended up falling asleep on the floor and later going upstairs to put herself to bed. Our youngest wasn’t too far behind her. Some bad water or food must have gotten into their systems and kept us homebound for the first several days of our friends’ visit. The days that followed were filled with cleaning up puke, snuggling sick littles, and Moana on repeat.
A true day in the life.
We did eventually get to some fun things—a day in the city, a quick trip to the village—only to return with a three-year-old’s head full of lice. So the next day was spent pouring over strands of hair and combing out eggs while convincing said three-year-old that pretending to be a statue was way more fun than it actually was. They might have thought Nepal was all about climbing mountains and finding hidden palaces and grand adventures but this…this is Nepal, ladies and gentlemen.
This is the life we live. A life constantly upheaved by interruptions and infections. We learn to live at peace with interruptions. We learn to move with them instead of around them. But we can forget how to do that when people come and we feel the pressure to present our lives in a particular way. Because the non-expat life is simpler. It’s easier to quantify. Things are less unexpected and more by the book. So often we try to quantify our lives here in newsletters and in visits with loved ones by the lives we change or by the adventures we have. But more often than not, we are surviving more than we are adventuring. And our visiting friends got to see that first hand. No charades. No accolades.
They held crying babies and cleaned up puke. They picked bugs out of hair and sat for hours while the tiny girls rested. They did our dishes and walked to the store. They played board games at our dining room table and saw the innermost workings of our life, in all of its unfiltered glory.
At the end of their short ten-day visit, they saw exactly what they came to see: our life—as it happens and the everydayness of it. With so much going on outside of our control, there was no need to put up our guard, to pretend we had it all together. And in letting down our guard, we were able to leave room enough to let our visitors in to see God working in our mundane and messy moments.
The sweetest part was, they didn’t judge it or condemn it. They celebrated it and indulged in it. They reminded us over and over that they didn't come to see Nepal or to see what we did or how we did it—they came to see us. They came to be with us and sit next to us.
That was humbling.
And so relieving.
And so life-giving.
It turned out we had nothing to be ashamed of. There was no need to hide behind a decked-out trip and agenda or a week of festivities. It might have been nice. But this was nice too, letting them see the real deal.
They left having permanently taken residence in our family and having made memories that will have outlasted any standard touristy thing we could have done. It was a trip gone wrong in many ways, but in all the right ways, too. After they left, things started to turn around. We got back to our regularly scheduled programming of adventures and misadventures. Next time we have visitors we hope to show them some of the sights, but also some of our life too—the slow and the fast, the good and the hard.
Because that’s where the true magic happens.