9 Tips for Thriving in Transition

Our little apartment once again is sprouting totes and little growing piles in the closets of “to take on our travels” things. We are preparing ourselves, the best we’ve learned how, as we head straight for our 11th transition season from one location to another in the last four years. Eager with the aura of an archaeologist as he fingers the lock on an ancient treasure chest, I’m opening up my collection of transition tips once again. With delight, I will spend time looking at our favorites, routines and tips that have been helpful friends in the past, delighted to find them waiting and ready for another season of good use. Wouldn’t you like to have me share some of the secrets to transitioning well that we’ve been hunting down and stocking up on these last years?

Thanks to Leonardo Yip at Unsplash for the pretty photo!

(If you are someone who has done or is doing a lot of transition too, I would be thrilled for you to send me your own treasury of thriving tips!)

And my treasure box lid swings open...

1. As transition approaches, several weeks before your actual move or departure, make a little quiet space to sit as a family. (You could even add in mugs of peppermint mocha or whatever drink you love to swirl to life in your kitchen!) Talk about and make a list of important places and people that you want to visit again before you leave, and incorporate that into the days left on your calendar. Give some intentionality and forethought into making those visits meaningful. Such as:

• make or buy little meaningful gifts for people and say how special or significant they have been in your life. (Family photo? Candy for children? Something that symbolizes your relationship with that friend?)

• Think of questions to ask before a visit to a friend such as “how can I pray for you?” or “what is your biggest joy/challenge right now?” which will help give you a meaningful goodbye connection. Or you might have a specific topic that you feel led to connect on before leaving, and that’s also wonderful.

• Decide together on a favorite street vendor or food place to visit one last time, and use the time to talk about how everyone feels the transition is going and how it makes them feel to be leaving, as well as the upcoming “arriving”. Pray together. God hears and likes when we don’t try to do it on our own.

2. This tip is from a family we love and met a couple years ago while abroad. Brian and Katie told us that they found immense benefit in their organization’s requirement that they create a space of time in-between countries to take a breath emotionally. For example, if you were living abroad in Morocco but going “home” for a few months to Peru, book a flight with a 2-4 day layover in Spain. Use the time to be quiet and unwind, saying “goodbye” to the last season and taking a deep breath before planning your furlough and time back “home”. We have never tried this for several reasons, and I think we tend to start winding down a week or so before we leave, thus giving us a bit of breathing space. However, if you are unable to do that and coming home looks like a big adjustment, this might be the perfect thing to help you thrive.

3. We picked this treasure tip up at the home of a family we know and respect who have raised their family on a foreign field. One or two days before you leave, set apart two special meal times. Here’s what you will do: at one meal, you will go around the table and have everyone say things they will miss from where you have been living and the things that make them sad about the transition. At the next one, go around the table and dream together of exciting prospects about the place where you’re going. This gives an opportunity to help each one find closure, which makes space in the heart to get excited about what’s ahead. This is something that we always do as a couple and have found to be very helpful!

4. This one is holding hands with number three, so hopefully your heart will swing from the one right to the other. Here it is: After focusing on the things that are changing in your transition season, turn the page and focus on the things that will never budge. There are so many things that change in a season of transition; new location, new ministry, new season, new people. It’s so easy to be so befuddled in all of those changes that we completely forget about the things that will never change. God’s Word will always be the same. His faithfulness will last and last, never running out of date or failing to show up when we need it most. His love encompasses both the past season and the one coming up, and even bridges the space in the middle.

5. Find things to laugh about. Miss Creativity will be your sweet handmaiden  in this task! Some of the things we’ve laughed a lot over include...

• being told, “We need more people like you to leave.” (They were trying to say that they thought we were good people!)

• being told, “It’s good to see you go!” (This person must’ve been trying to say that they liked the reason we were leaving, or maybe that they were glad to know that someone in their neighborhood was stepping out for a good cause. They meant well. We just thought it was really funny how it sounded!)

• being told, “HOW did your daughter get so cute??” (Obviously not from me!)

• the fun of seeing God providing when He promised He would but we didn’t know how it would happen.

• The jar of smooth peanut butter in a foreign store which sits beside the “crunchy” jar, and bears the label, “smoothy”.

6. Realize that transitions will be messy. (For elaboration on this and so much more, read Looming Transitions by Amy Young.) Simply knowing that transitions cause stress and that everything won’t happen perfectly can really help. You will probably forget something in your packing, miss doing something you meant to do, and get upset at someone when you didn’t mean to. Knowing that there’s a 99.9% chance that there will be some sort of “messy moments” can help in letting go of your drivenness to “do it perfectly”. Letting yourself have some grace can also help you realize that the people around you aren’t trying to be irritating or aggravating, but rather you’re dealing with a lot emotionally and physically. Take a deep breath and relax. Transition is just another season.

7. As a practical tip, choose a few meaningful decor items along with you from place to place to give a sense of continuity and “home” wherever you go. I like to bring lightweight, bright and cheery items that can easily make any room feel attractive to me. A little wooden or metal book stand can hold many kinds of different decorations and display a photo, a pretty goodbye card from a friend, a family photo book, a plate, or any other number of things you may wish to display as simple, easy decor! Colorful scarves can double as cushioning for odd shaped items in your suitcase as well as elegant attire for windows, dressers, or anything else that needs some help in the color department. Now that I have a daughter, I am trying to keep some things the same wherever we go. Favorite board books and a familiar lullaby at night are two of the things I’ve done so far.

8. Say “good goodbyes”. Cry if you feel like it. Help your children say goodbye to things and places that they will miss. Many times we like to say “goodbye” to rooms in a house, remembering like a video on fast-forward all the many memories made in each room, in a sense “wrapping them up” and carefully packing them away for future enjoyment, enshrouded in the grace of God.

9. Celebrate the freshness that a transition can bring! When life is exactly the same for too long, one can start to lose perspective; whereas a change can help you see things differently, with "new eyes". I suppose I could also mention that waters of transition can be so choppy and rough that you will not be able to stagnate very easily! I find that as I follow Christ in obedience through transitions I am kept spiritually “on my toes” and actively pursuing God. There are many challenges in times of transition; but the good side is that at least amidst your transitions, you don’t have to struggle with monotony and a boring life!

Can you add anything to my list? Please share, for it might be something that I need in this season!

Vignettes from Jordan

Warm desert sunshine is streaming through the kitchen window as I sit in the kitchen of our friends who have ever so graciously allowed us to inhabit their home with them for the twelve days we are here in Jordan. I know that some of you very much would like to get some peeks into our time here, so I picked seven moments to share with you.

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Chicken sandwich rolls scented the dry cabin air as the plane sped 500 miles per hour towards a very special place. The warm breathing and snoozing wiggles of Baby Joy on my lap felt cuddly and close. As I tried to sleep, my mind drifted behind my eyelids to the last time I flew to Jordan. There had been warm wiggles of a baby who was “in my lap”, so to speak, on that other flight. He had been snoozing and wiggling, but not on the outside. 

My eyelids fluttered open, to gaze out the oval portal into the wide, free blue heavens streaked with a few misty clouds far below. “Somehow this journey, even the first few hours of it, is bringing so much remembering to me,” I mused. And although not audible I heard my Heavenly Daddy say, “I remember, too.” 

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The dawn still struggled with the night sky as my daughter tumbled around on the bed, hot with a fever. My mind took me helplessly back to that night with my other baby, when I realized something was wrong and the next day I laid him in a shallow desert tomb. “This will always be the outcome of bringing your children to this place,” the tempter whispered slyly. “Lord, not again! Lord, how should I feel?” My prayers breathed out while her stuffy little nose breathed in. Then, the realization: He remembers, too. He remembers the pain, the shock, the trauma, the grief. He was here with me. He knows my weakness for fear. And He is The Overcomer. He is our Shield. In Him I have put my trust. He is All Powerful. He is able to heal and to cast out the wicked one. He is excited when I lean the weight of my faith completely into Him around the hairpin switchbacks of life when I can’t see ahead, and want to close my eyes to avoid looking at the chasm to the right. He remembers the past with me, and He also holds the keys to the future. A good future, with Him.

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The gate swung open to reveal a girl I recognized - barely. Two years had blossomed her from a young teen to a young woman leaving in a week for Germany to finish high school. With a flourish of her arm as her loose three-quarter-length sleeve swished in the breeze, we were welcomed in to her family’s courtyard and house. The very place where we had lived our lives in   two and a half intensely formative months, learning language and learning life with loss and grief and Jesus in a new culture.

As I lifted my foot to cross the memorable, odd metal threshold of the doorway where so much of our life had passed through, I remembered. As I looked around the redecorated living space, I remembered. As I walked in shock out to the kitchen where magnets still held up papers displaying cherished verses in my handwriting, I remembered.

The grace. The grief. The weeping. The wondering. The struggling with Arabic phrases and culture with a tired brain and weary body. The quarts of bright purple fresh grape juice we pressed ourselves from the vines outside. The tea and coffee made in the kitchen. That one very unsightly cracked tile in the floor by the stove. The bathroom, where it seemed I spent so much time after the day when I realized within its walls that my baby and I were in for some trauma. The bedroom, where I lay weak and exhausted after birth, then with an intense intestinal infection, and where I came to collapse after language classes. And I felt a Presence with me. “Hannah, my daughter, I remember too.”

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Thoughtfully, I fingered a scarf in preparation for tying it over my hair. Without asking for permission, my mind took me right back to the weeks where I deliberated over which scarf to buy in remembrance of Seth. The day of his birth and burial, I had longed to be able to clothe him with something boyish, babyish and delicate. My dreams were ended in the reality that all I had was a scarf of bright, garish teal, bought generously by a woman I barely knew. True, at least I had something. But to try to ease my longing to have been able to wrap his body with my motherly caress in a gentle cloth of baby blue, Jonathan said I could buy myself a headscarf of that color. So this scarf had become the much-deliberated-over, chosen memento. Bought from the land where he was carried and born and buried. How I treasured this tangible item that I could wear, something I could touch every day and remember how proudly grateful I am for my little son. Fondly, I gazed at the worn fabric, then looped and tied it around my brown hair. Remembering.

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Through the glass sliding doors I could see into the sanctuary, where people were gathered to pray and share stories. The rise and fall of South-African-accented-English and the Arabic translation filled the tile room, as I rocked my little girl to sleep. Like a dream, I realized that now I am holding a big, healthy child of my own. How many Sundays, and Tuesdays, and any days we met in that sanctuary two years ago, I had found my helpless gaze stuck by the glue of curiosity to those glass sliding doors. Behind them, a hubbub of mommies caring for little ones played like a fascinating drama to my aching soul. Pregnant moms putting their feet up on the brown couches; tired moms chasing toddlers across the tile, giving out snacks, wiping tears and messy faces. Moms doing what my very being welled with love and longing to do for my precious little boy. Moms with their tired bodies and sleepy eyes, moms whom I felt like I should belong amongst. Moms whose club I had joined, but now was a drop-out, for my baby had dropped out from this life and into the next. 

I remembered how the tears would well, and I would wonder what I could do for my aching heart. If only one of those moms would let me hold their baby, perhaps a little of the longing would be satisfied. But I was afraid they wouldn’t want my misery to get that close to their healthy happiness. Maybe they wouldn’t want my tragedy reach out and be in the vicinity of their precious babies. Sometimes I was brave enough to go into the nursery and soak in the camaraderie of mommyhood, brave enough to get close and share their joy and be willing to share my pain if they inquired.

My big, healthy girl snuggled deeper into my arms, and I stopped my reverie. “God has been so tenderly good to me,” I mused. “To bring me back to this place and remember. To remember my fears that I would ever have a living little one with me on this earth. To remember my longings and heartaches, and to miss my Seth and enjoy my Joy.” 

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The cemetery looked exactly the same as it did years before; a pale desert of graves. It struck me afresh that this area reminds me of a woman who heard some horrible news and all the color drained from her face. Nearly everything seems to fall under the category of a pasty cream color; from the earth to the rooftops of the boxy houses. Even the fig trees are covered in grey dust right now, and their leaves take on the color à la mode. As in a dream, I followed my husband as we made a pathway through marble and cement box-like tombs of various shapes and sizes, back to the little spot that marked the life of someone in our family. And there it was. Cement block marking with gravel inside, and a small piece of marble on which I had written Seth Malakai, son of Jonathan and Hannah Rudolph. The best I'd had was a “permanent” marker, now perfectly cleaned off by weather and sand. 

The pastor and the tomb-maker followed behind me, ready to make plans for building a cement box topped by an engraved piece of rock for the name and details of our son. Somewhat numbed by their presence, we gathered around and confirmed the details. Then, very kindly, they retreated a short distance away for a few minutes so we could be alone. Our daughter sat on the edge of a concrete block, swinging her chubby little legs and clapping her hands. 

I noticed her feet, and remembered the little baby feet I had tucked for the last and only time in a piece of cloth and left here under the sandy soil. Earth and heaven both felt closer here, as we stopped to pause and reflect.

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Up in the night, for the sixth or twelfth time, I caressed my little daughter, gently stroking her feverish forehead as she gulped my healthy milk. Far from resenting the interruption to a precious sleep, my mind was filled with remembering the last time I spent wakeful nights in this very city. In that season, however, the hours were haunted with longings for the baby who felt so close yet so unmistakably far away. Or was it unmistakably far away and yet so close? I wasn’t sure. Full of milk, I had longed to feed. Full of love, I had longed to give. Now I am here again, fully able to do both. I barely dared to dream about this day, back then when I would have given just about anything to have been able to stay up in the night, or awake in the hospital, with the son of my longings. Love hurts. And now, pouring out my sacrificial mother love on a little girly human, I think I started to believe what my Heavenly Parent was whispering then to my aching, refusing heart: “I ache with you. I really understand how much it hurts. I dare to love, too.”

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