To our friends, coworkers, family, and students far away, I want you to know that I still see you. I see someone who walks or looks like you at the grocery store, someone who drives a car the same model or color as yours. I hear someone speaking another language and move closer to determine if it is that language that is music to my ears. I still hear you. I laugh and sometimes cry, remembering the times we shared. 

Life, in general, is filled with transitions. For global workers, they happen often! Leaving family and friends behind as you transition to another culture and language is only the beginning. Support raising and furloughs often involve staying in a different place weekly. Changing fields and the goodbyes of colleagues and national friends are difficult. Leaving a place and people we love is heart-wrenching. Our moves or those of others whom God directs to relocate may bring discouragement. Feelings of loss and loneliness abound as the process repeats itself again and again. 

In our current home, I sometimes search for items that did not “make the cut” as we shipped things back to our passport country. It is easy to forget and second-guess our choices after completing the inevitable process of paring down belongings to save money or fit everything into suitcases. 

At the beginning of our final transition, moving back to the States for “retirement,” we wondered who we were in this new place. What should we get up and do each day? Who would God bring into our lives to serve and encourage? Could the gifts we exercised on the field be used here as well? 

During all of life’s transitions, Psalm 139:16 reminds me that my Creator is not surprised or dismayed. He is not caught off guard or making things up as He goes along. God wrote my life’s story with its twists and turns before I lived a single day. “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” 

Take heart, struggling pilgrim. He wrote your story, too.