There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles into an apartment when more than half your family is somewhere else. H learned what it sounded like over three months. The echo of a space that’s supposed to have more people in it. But spring came, and so did they. Walking back through the door, K in arms and bags at our feet, the quiet lifted. Coming home is different when home is still a new word for it. But it was the right word.

The apartment felt different the moment they walked back through the door.

K looked around at the walls, the furniture, and the familiar light coming through the windows. Then he did something he couldn’t do the last time he was here. He got down on the floor and started crawling.

Three months. That’s how long it had been since we were all under the same roof of our home.

It started at the airport. We were on our way to a team retreat when officials stopped us and told us there was a problem. K had exceeded his allowed time in the country. If we boarded that flight, he wouldn’t be allowed back for ninety days. We stood there in the terminal, bags in hand, trying to process what that actually meant.

What followed was not what we imagined for the start of our year.

T and K stayed. H came back alone.

Those three months looked different for each of us.

For H, it meant starting his master’s program in Gastronomy and Culinary Arts, studying alongside seasoned professors and chefs, trying to keep up in a language that still doesn’t always come naturally. It was difficult. It was also unexpectedly rich. He started making friends on campus, becoming close to his professors, and being invited into the kitchen to cook and experiment, and visit festivals across the country to learn the beauty of food and culture offered here. Studying together with strangers lead to grabbing meals together, developing friendships, and now one of them has been joining us in our weekly Bible study ever since.

For T, it meant doing something harder than putting into words. She was alone with an infant in a country she never planned to live in. New streets, a new language, a culture that wasn’t hers. But even then, the people around her made it feel less foreign than it should have. The local church took her in. New friends surrounded her. T’s parents flew out to be with her, which made more of a difference than we can properly explain.

And every few weekends, H would board a three-hour flight and they would all be in the same room again — briefly, together, and grateful.

K learned to crawl in those three months. He said “mama” for the first time then too.

He’s still working on “papa.” We believe in him.

Now that he’s home and moving freely across every surface of our apartment, we are realizing just how thoroughly we failed to babyproof anything. He now knows how to get off the couch safely, detect a rogue cheerio on the floor, and distribute his toys evenly for the highest probability it will get stepped on by an adult. It turns out absence does not prepare you for a crawling baby. Our neighbours, friends, and church community are delighted to have him back. So are we.

A few days after they returned, we were walking through the neighbourhood when we spotted the shopkeepers out front, passing around coffee in that unhurried way that happens on slow afternoons here. We saw them before they saw us. We called out hello, and we were suddenly sitting with them. The chicken and rice shopkeeper, his wife, a few of the others from the street, all gathered around. He told us they had noticed the quiet. That they had missed seeing us all together. We had been meaning to do something like this for months. It just took a slow afternoon and an open invitation to finally make it happen. We didn’t stay long, but we left full in the way that only happens when a place has actually become yours.

It got us thinking. How often do we walk past moments like that because our hands are too full or our schedule too tight? Maybe the goal isn’t to plan more but to leave more room. To walk a little slower. To leave for school an hour early just in case someone is out front with a cup of coffee and an open chair. We don’t want to be so busy that we can’t stop. We’re learning to hold our schedules a little more loosely and our neighbours a little closer.

This season stretched us in ways we didn’t ask for and couldn’t have planned. But looking back, we can see how held we were. By friends, by community, by family who got on planes, by a God who was not surprised by any of it.

We’re home. And we’re grateful.

H&T