Why Is Life Overseas So Hard for Many Missionaries?

Overseas life, and particularly that of a missionary, is one of tensions and in-betweens. Resident and pilgrim meet on this path because you become both. It’s a strange world to inhabit, all the while feeling you don’t quite belong either place. 

In one three-year term, my computer and iPhone died at the same time. We experienced a broken relationship with a national and a crumbling relationship with a colleague. My wife’s dad and my dad nearly died, leading us to return briefly to the U.S. Meanwhile, I encountered unwanted weight loss, and my wife fell sick with a chronic illness. And those are just some of the stressors for that term. As a missionary, all of life’s problems, including spiritual warfare, are compressed and given to you on a steady basis — and in a foreign language to boot. Living in a foreign culture is enough stress by itself, even if it’s in a place you love. Depending on where you live, the lack of modernity plays into all the hardship. But even if there’s ample modernity, there will be ample foreignness. Life overseas often causes you to endure long seasons of loneliness and sleep disturbances due to insects, spiritual warfare, blaring music, drums, religious chants and songs, and lack of privacy. Mix in some typical conflict with teammates or nationals (spiritual warfare again), and, well, sleeplessness and stomach issues can abound. When you fall sick, it tightens the noose.

The length of your term affects your life deeply. In fact, the one-way ticket has a life of its own. It comes with adventure, but this journey brings a shadow. The duration is partly a blessing because it keeps you where you belong for three or so years. That helps you connect to your new culture. But with it, you receive plenty of opportunities to realize the extent of your weakness. The pain and the duration of time outside of your original country get you hankering for something somewhere else. Ideally your heart drifts to heaven, but it might return more than you’d like to your country of origin. It’s a slow lesson in contentment and a gradual cultivating of your longing for something better, recalibrating your taste buds. It’s practice for looking toward heaven. Staying out of your home country for long stretches gives you a different perspective when you visit where you grew up. Often it’s not quite what you imagined when you get back to your birth country. It disappoints. It gets you thirsty for something better, but often it may have you mentally returning to your new home in the country where you serve. Eventually you get back to your new home amid your target group overseas. Again, the one-way ticket is a blessing that burdens. Outsider you once were in your new country, and outsider you shall ever be, and there’s no returning. Even when you visit your home country, you remain somewhat of an outsider there, changed by the overseas experience. As one man said of missionaries, you can never go home, and yet you’re somewhat at home everywhere you go.¹ It is a life of constant change. As others have said, the missionary life is filled with happy hellos and sad goodbyes.

Weaknesses surface more easily overseas. You feel like a child, helpless in a new place. Even after gaining language and cultural skills, you can quickly find yourself in the jaws of confusion. Bewildered, you think, “I thought I knew how to say that.”

Problems come to all of us in this fallen world, missionary or not, Christian or not. Yet being a missionary can feel like you’re being singled out for a hard hit. Perhaps the difference is like being hit in the stomach with a basketball (hardships in your home culture) compared to being hit in the back with a bowling ball (hardships in your new country). When my son was younger and one of us got hurt roughhousing, we’d joke by saying, “I love pain.” This helped us remember that we were men (or learning to become such) because we didn’t want to be too soft. Then we’d always add, “… just not so much pain all at one time in one area.” This helped us remember we were human with boundaries, limits, and breaking points. Life overseas is a whole lot of pain all at once, just for you, concentrated in one area. Not just a punch. It’s like being hit with the middle knuckle extended, extra hard, in the xiphoid process, several times in a row. It’s just as much a blessing, but it comes with burdens. Things tend to rush at you supercharged: beauty and beatings. You see a national trust Christ and start growing, but your disagreements with your spouse increase. You make progress reading the Bible in a new language, but you get evicted from your house. 

And I haven’t even discussed the busyness of sharing the gospel, discipling new Christians (which requires preparing in the local language), and nurturing your own family spiritually. Add to that staying in touch with supporting churches in your homeland. Factor in a few more volts of stress if you live in a closed country. What if you’re a homeschooling mom overseas? The volts intensify. Like a pastor’s life, the workload can overwhelm. Despite it all, by the Lord’s grace, the strange foreign place becomes your home. You begin to hear, “‘My grace is sufficient for you’” (2 Cor 12:9 ESV). At first you don’t believe it, at least not entirely. Then, as you persevere, you do in fact believe. By the Lord’s grace, you become quite a believer. And while your new culture is home, you often feel the need for relief from what’s there, even when you love it. The distance and duration from your homeland can help keep in check your tendency to pretend to be a messiah. You’re too far from family to help when they need it, so you learn to pray. You weep, but you can’t change much from so far away (nor perhaps could you if you were there). You learn you can’t be the church for your family in your birth country. Thus, you stay planted in your new place. You learn to lament.

Life overseas is a wonder and a whipping. Even with lots of whining along the way, you learn to suffer for the sake of the gospel. Missionaries are sinners too, needing serious sanctification. While in our home countries we’re treated as saints, yet we know how cantankerous we can get. Often, we’re God’s hard cases sent overseas for industrial-strength doses of sanctification. The Lord is faithful in the process, but it can hurt. And that’s what makes it so great. That’s what makes it so different. And perhaps that’s what makes it so hard.

Kenneth Hayward (pseudonym for security reasons) has been overseas for more than a decade and a half, lives in Asia with his family, and can be contacted at: stand4truth 777 at hotmail.com (no spaces and with @).

1. Karl Dahlfred, “Why Missionaries Can Never Go Home Again,” Gleanings From the Field (blog), November 25, 2014, https://www.dahlfred.com/blogs/gleanings-from-the-field/why-missionaries-can-never-go-home-again.