Re-Entry

Stranger in a Strange Land

Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown.

Luke 4:24

In 1983, Bill Forsyth made a quiet film about a man who falls in love with the wrong place. Local Hero stars Peter Riegert as Mac MacIntyre, a Houston oil executive sent to buy a Scottish village for a refinery. He goes expecting a transaction. What he gets is the pub, the beach, the northern lights, the pace of people who aren’t going anywhere. Mark Knopfler wrote the score. Mac flies home. The final shot is his sterile apartment with shells from Scotland on the counter, while back in the village a phone box rings on the beach with nobody to answer it.

I watched it when I was 17 or 18. Mac wasn’t a missionary kid. Ferness wasn’t Lima. But that ending stayed with me.

Before I left Peru for university, the mission board sent me to two re-entry camps. One outside Quito, Ecuador. Another in North Carolina. The camps existed because the organizations that sent our parents overseas had figured out, eventually, that we’d need help coming back.

The curriculum was practical. Personality assessments. Sessions on current American fashion (this was 1987, and the assessment was generous). A trip to a gas station to learn how self-service pumping worked. In Lima, every station was full-service. You pulled up, someone filled your tank.

I sat in those sessions next to MKs from Tanzania who’d split their childhood between their parents out in the bush and a boarding school called Rift Valley Academy. For them, the immersion courses mattered in ways mine didn’t. I’d grown up in a cosmopolitan city of seven million people. I knew traffic and crowds and commerce. But I’d only driven a car five times in my life, and two of those were for driving tests I failed.

The small gaps were manageable. You learned the gas pump. You learned the fashion. You learned that Americans expected you to arrive at the stated time.

That last one took me longer than anything.

During my first year at Samford, a group of new friends invited me out. We’d rendezvous at the student center. I arrived thirty minutes late. In my mind, that was early. In Lima, you don’t arrive at the stated time. That would be rude. You arrive after, and the host is relieved because they aren’t ready either. Everyone knows this. Nobody teaches it. You learn it the way you learn everything in Lima. By breathing.

I stood in the student center at 7:30 looking for people who’d left at 7:15.

The gas pumps and the clock weren’t the real problem. You can learn a gas pump in ten minutes. You can buy a watch. The real problem was something the re-entry camps never addressed, because nobody knew how to teach it.

The assumption.

Everyone assumed America would feel like home. That the land of your mother and father would feel as good to you as it did for them. That their nostalgia would transfer. That their Thanksgiving would be your Thanksgiving, their church would be your church, their comfort would be yours.

It didn’t.

My parents loved the United States the way you love a thing you chose to leave and chose to return to. They had roots. They had a version of the country that existed before they left for Peru. The hymns they sang at First Baptist were the hymns they’d grown up singing. The streets of Stafford County made sense because they’d driven them before I was born.

I had Lima. Combis grinding through Miraflores at 6 a.m. Anticuchos from the carts on Avenida Arequipa. A country that was mine in my bones and not mine on my passport. America was on my passport and in my parents’ hearts, and those two facts didn’t add up to belonging.

Frederick Buechner was a Presbyterian minister who spent most of his life writing about the things Christians feel but don’t say in church. In The Longing for Home, he traced the word back to its roots: “The word longing comes from the same root as the word long in the sense of length in either time or space and also the word belong, so that in its full richness to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to and that belongs to us.”

Longing and belonging. Same root. Same ache. The re-entry camps could teach us gas pumps and fashion, but they couldn’t teach us what to do with the ache of belonging to a place that wasn’t ours to keep.

I think about Christ in Nazareth. Luke tells it plainly. Jesus returns to the town where he grew up. He walks into the synagogue on the Sabbath, and they hand him the scroll of Isaiah. He reads the passage about the Spirit of the Lord anointing him to proclaim good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, liberty for the oppressed. He rolls up the scroll, sits down, and says: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

And the room turns.

They knew his parents. They knew the carpenter’s shop. They had a version of Jesus that made sense to them, the local boy, and the person standing before them didn’t fit it. He’d been formed somewhere else. By the Jordan. By the wilderness. By forty days with the Spirit and the devil. He came back carrying something they couldn’t recognize, and their failure to see it wasn’t passive. It was violent. They dragged him to the brow of a hill to throw him off.

No prophet is acceptable in his hometown. Not because the hometown is cruel. Because the prophet isn’t the person who left.

Our parents went where God sent them. We went where our parents went. The gap between those two callings is where most of us learned to live.

Christ didn’t return to Nazareth expecting applause. He returned carrying a word that would cost him everything. And when they rejected it, Luke says he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. Through the crowd. Out the other side.

I learned to pump gas. I learned to show up on time. I learned to stop expecting my university town to feel like Lima.

I never learned to stop missing it.

Christ walked through the crowd and kept going.

I think about that a lot.