What does a missionary on home assigment do?

A question I had during my missionary training was, “What do you do as a missionary when you’re at home for 6–12 months?” Is it a holiday? Do you find paid employment? Do you speak at churches every week? Is it busy? Or do you just sit twiddling your thumbs?

I’m now in a position to answer my question, as we’ve been in the Netherlands for six weeks. The answer has got to be: it depends! This is our third time home, but it’s the first time we’re back without expecting a baby. It’s also the first time we’ve started our home assignment in the Netherlands instead of the UK, and thankfully, it isn’t during a COVID lockdown anymore. What our three home assignments have looked like has varied even for our own family, so I certainly can’t give a general answer for every missionary family! It’s always going to be very family- and circumstance-specific.

Here’s what our last six weeks have contained:

Family Time

The last time we were here, Alice and Millie were still babies. Now they are walking, talking little people who can’t remember seeing their grandparents in person. We’ve been enjoying time with family in the normal daily routines of meals, days out to the zoo, plucking berries in the garden, baking, food shopping trips, and reading books.

We’re enjoying a mix of special days out and just “normal” daily life. Normal daily life feels quite new and exciting to us. We’re still excited by trips to the supermarket for food shopping, as every time we go, there’s an opportunity to bring back a food treat we haven’t eaten for four years—or, in our children’s case, have never tried!

Office Time

Now that I’ve started preparing Kovol language literacy materials and Bible translations, I’ve unlocked unlimited opportunities for office work. A priority project is to redo the literacy course I finished in June because we changed our alphabet. The process of preparing and working with our Kovol language material really drove home how difficult we’d made life with some of our alphabet decisions, and it’s better to make the change earlier rather than later.

I would love to get stuck into that, but I haven’t found the time yet.

More urgent was for our team to review our strategy statement document. This is a document where we outline our goals and how we’ve agreed to work together to reach them. With the lessons we’ve learned over the years, we really need to revise and update it. We’re looking to add a third family to our team shortly, and that’s another reason to rethink and rewrite parts of our strategy statement.

When we initially wrote the strategy statement, we hadn’t started with Bible translation yet, for example. We wrote some of our ideas down, but now that working on translation is a reality, we can include more details. A section we’ve seen the need to add is one on how we handle disagreements between team members regarding the translation of a passage. Each passage will have a primary translator, but if the primary translator makes an exegetical interpretation decision that a team member disagrees with, what do we do? Or what if a team member feels that the Kovol text could be written better a different way, but the primary translator disagrees? Who gets to decide the wording? Must it be a unanimous team decision? A vote? Does the primary translator decide? Does the translation consultant decide (not feasible, as they don’t speak the Kovol language)?

Part of the home assignment time, then, involves video calls with Philip and Natalie in Kovol and updating our strategy document.

Presentations

I’ve spoken publicly five times in the last six weeks—a mix of Bible teaching and Kovol updates. The big challenge for me has been that three of them were in Dutch! Fortunately, my audience has been very kind to me and my rusty Dutch. It’s been a real pleasure to give updates and see so many faces. For years, our experience of church has been our small church planting team in Kovol, even a few months of being entirely alone with no other believers to meet with on a Sunday.

It is a real treat to meet so many believers, and an honour to speak to them. I haven’t been able to do a lot of Bible teaching for the last few years. Lord willing, that is to change soon, and I’ll be busy teaching the Gospel in the Kovol language, but I have missed needing to dig into God’s Word to be ready to share it with others. I’ve been blessed to get some time here in the Netherlands to do just that, and then to travel and see different groups of God’s people.

Visits

Visiting churches is a joy, but visiting individual friends and supporters has perhaps been even more of a treat. Again, a challenge for my Dutch, but sharing stories with people here is great. We’ve enjoyed our bond with other believers. Our lives look very different—Papua New Guinea versus the Netherlands—but under the surface, our life goals and focus are so remarkably similar. I get a family feeling being with others whose focus in life is God’s Kingdom.

Homeschool

After a four-week break from school, Gerdine’s task has been to get Oscar started with Year 3 while also starting Alice and Millie with Reception. Homeschooling is a huge time and energy responsibility for Gerdine, and I think we overestimated how much activity our family could handle.

Being in the Netherlands for only two months, we’ve wanted to squeeze in as much as possible: lots of activities, lots of visits, and lots of time in the car. It was a mistake, I think, to assume that homeschooling would just fit in with everything and not budget time and energy for it.

Doing school all morning and then driving off for a visit in the afternoon, for example, worked in our minds, but when does the preparation for the next day happen? Normally, in the evenings or on weekends, but we’d booked evenings and weekends with visits.

The result has been a very tired and burdened Gerdine. The Netherlands is Gerdine’s home country, and Dutch is her language, so we’ve settled into a rhythm where Gerdine makes all the plans for the Netherlands and handles all the arranging and emailing in Dutch. I’ve now taken that from her entirely as we’ve realised that Gerdine needs more time and energy to keep homeschooling going. Thinking about it, it does seem a bit silly that continuing school with Oscar and then adding Alice and Millie on top of that would “just happen”, and we could schedule around it.

Adjustments aside, homeschool has been great. We’ve found that the routine it offers is beneficial for our children, even if they don’t always want to “do school.” They appreciate the predictability of a known routine. Alice and Millie learned about zero this week, and they make sure to tell people about it and point out the zeros they see when we’re visiting!

House Hunting

We’re supposed to move to the UK in three weeks to start a six-month rental contract in a house in Bracknell. The small niggle with that plan is that we haven’t found anywhere yet! I’ve spent a bit of time every day chasing estate agents and trying to rent a home in Bracknell, but so far to no avail. All the landlords involved have so far said that six months is too short a time for their tastes, and there seems to be no shortage of tenants to choose from.

The lack of a place to stay hasn’t been from lack of effort on our end. We’ve been pushing on different doors, but so far, one hasn’t opened. I’ve been taking to heart Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:25, “do not be anxious about your life,” as a way of honouring God. He’s our Heavenly Father, and He’s promised to provide, so anxiety has no place in my heart. It is getting exciting, though, as the days tick by.

Rest

People have asked us if we have a holiday scheduled. We don’t, but we also don’t feel we need one. We need rest, for sure, but with all the changes in our lives and the constant responsibility of three children, we’ve found that routine is better than a holiday for us. With international travel and all the visits we’re doing, we don’t have the desire to travel somewhere else yet again to set up a different routine in a different place, even if it is a for a holiday.

What works best for us right now is to carry on with our work and responsibilities, but to take our foot off the accelerator when we can. Half work/school days and half rest works for us. Our children really love visiting playgrounds, especially indoor play areas. Scheduling trips to “Money Town” is the rest our children like.

I splashed out and bought a Steam Deck—a handheld gaming computer. I now have this handheld device I can bring with me on trips, tap the on button, and get into a game. It’s been fun to lounge on the sofa with it or outside on a deck chair. Oscar also loves to make use of it when he’s allowed.

For Gerdine, rest means being settled in her own place with a predictable routine. She has had a harder time than the rest of our family finding her rest. Uncertainty about where we will soon live and lots of travel make it hard for her to settle down and truly rest.

So, what does a missionary do on Home Assignment?

Quite a mix of things, and it’ll be different for every missionary family every time they come home. A challenge is to both optimise and balance the routine and schedule as everything changes. In Kovol, we had our routine, and we pursued faithfulness in grinding through language learning and then translation. What does faithfulness look like here? It’s hard to know when we haven’t truly found our feet and routine yet.

I can say, though, that we are blessed. We have what we need, and we have a lot to enjoy.