Lament of an MK

I am an MK. It’s 4am Sunday morning, I have gotten a total of 1 hour of sleep this night – I can’t sleep. I’m fraught with anxiety and discouragement I’m only now realizing is there inside me and that has brought me to a place where I have no where else to turn to. I am ready to be helped.

We Mk’s, we’re independent and we don’t always know how we got to be that way. We are thrust into a world from day one where we feel like intruders, asking for help from strangers we don’t know to send us overseas. We end up invading a land not familiar, feeling like aliens, always on guard for cultural faux pas so that we “don’t ruin our witness”.

For the rest of our life, we will be scarred with feelings of misunderstanding and rootlessness, there is no place to lay our soul-weary heads and rest and “be”. There is always more explaining, always more being understanding towards others who don’t understand us. There is never a place of rest – for isn’t that what home is, more than anything else: a place of safety where we feel loved, accepted, known, understood – where all our needs are met.

For some of us, even our earthly homes – or at least those things that can give an inkling of a taste of home – will be stripped from us as we leave family and familiar territory behind to discover the wide open world in front of us. When we consider where to move to next, the whole world is an option, not just the next city over.

Foreigners in a strange land. Many would call us blessed, for we are that much further along in understanding Peter when he described the Christians as such. And yet it often feels so much more like a curse. Foreigners. Outcasts. Outsiders. Always the one to do the explaining, never the one to receive the understanding. And who can blame them? It’s not their fault they were born into a stable lifestyle, (of course, we know, it is just as riddled with difficulty), just as much as it isn’t our fault we were made MKs.

Except that try as you might, you don’t outgrow the world of an MK, even when your world shrinks in on you as you try to “settle” down. Trust me, I’ve tried. For almost 7 years now, I’ve “settled” but the same issues of rootlessness and lack of belonging arise again and again – the same feelings of isolation, loneliness, despair. Try as I might, even when they are relieved, it is only temporary. For, “this world is not our home”, so we are told, and desperately try to believe. “This world is not our home”.

How do we survive in this foreign land we’ve been placed in? Day to day, just a like a weary soldier marching on, one step in front of the next.

We wait.

And cry.
And ache with longing.

Our Messiah is coming for us. Coming to take us home.