By Eric and Margaret Young

It is difficult for parents to let go of their children.  Here, Eric and Margaret share with us how they cope with their daughter’s absence.  Sarah left England and came to the Philippines as a missionary.  In her article, ‘Happy where I am’, she shares with us her life away from home.

Phone bills are suddenly much larger.  Kitchen scales, which have done good service for years, are repaired because accuracy is suddenly essential for the cost of the parcels.  Why?  Because our ‘child’ is thousands of miles away, and it is vital to keep in touch.  This is the age of adventure, freedom, cheap travel.  Youngsters take gap years between high school and university, leave home with a backpack and head off into the wide blue yonder.  Anxious parents meet and swap notes and worry about their absent offspring.  Parents in the United Kingdom have come to terms with the fact that they won’t see their young until the gap year is run.

Journey into the unknown

As parents of Sarah, a Columban lay missionary in the Philippines, we are part of this club, but with a difference.  We know that our daughter has left home, not for 12 months’ adventure, not for the excitement of seeing the world or traveling as far as possible in the time allotted before settling down to university or work.  She has left us to live a life that has called her to give up her job as a teacher, her home, her friends and commit herself to three years in a foreign country.  She has asked the Columbans to show her the way to travel into a world very different from that which she has always known.  I doubt if she and her companions know where the journey will eventually lead them.  But this is not the most important part.  Even if after all their wanderings they return right back to where they set out from they’ll have traveled on a journey in which they’ll have found themselves.

Parents left behind to wonder why and worry are also on a journey.  We ask ourselves questions and not just the mundane ones about Sarah’s health and strength.  We who have nursed her through all her ailments suddenly find ourselves reading up on tropical diseases.  When we get the phone call and are filled with dread when asked whether we want the good news or the bad first – the good news being ‘I’m out of the hospital now,’ the bad ‘it was dengue fever’ – we want to shout down the line, ‘Come home now’ but don’t.  We just say, ‘Thank God.’

Nothing else but prayers

We sit alone in our pleasant solitude and think of Sarah feeling isolated from the life she has left, wondering how she can bear the loneliness which must be inevitable, the weather, the food and the customs, ‘Please God, giver her strength and fortitude.’

We scan the newspapers daily and listen to the radio for details of happenings in the Philippines.  When something does occur we’re told when we next contact Sarah, ‘That was 1,000 miles away.’ But we check the atlas and pray, ‘Dear Lord, save her from harm.’

We receive Sarah’s letters and read between the lines.  The words on the page tell the everyday stories of her life but the form of sentence, the slant of the pen, the actual choice of the words we are reading tells us much more.  We say, ‘Please God, be near her.’

We get photos and pore over them.  ‘She’s getting fat, losing weight, looks happy/strained/fit/not fit.’  They show her living a life we do not know and at times cannot understand.  We see her busy with strangers and sometimes we feel jealous that someone else has her attention and we pray, ‘Help us to understand.’

Missionaries in our own way

Trying to understand why our daughter has chosen this path takes up a lot of our energy.  One thing, however, which is the direct result of her action, is to make her parents into evangelists.  When we’re asked how she is and what she’s doing we have the opportunity to spread the Good News to acquaintances with whom we’ve never spoken of matters of faith, and it’s surprising how interested they are.  God works in wonderful ways!

We’ve learned to pray as we’ve never prayed before and in talking over our fears and uncertainties with Our Lord we’ve come to know and love Him better.  Our distant involvement with the lay missionary process has disturbed our comfortable lives, made us aware of the world outside, and we’re humbly thankful to have been called to play a small part in the work of the Gospel.