7.2 Strategies for Reentry

• Recognize that reentry challenges are common for many people returning from an extended overseas experience
• Acknowledge that saying goodbye to friends/host family/faculty from your International Student Teaching may prove emotional
• Remember that people will have varying levels of interest in your International Student Teaching experience
• Reflect on your experience periodically through a journal
• Be patient with yourself and others

Pace. It takes time to adjust to a new culture. It will take time to re-adjust to life back home. You may not be at a place to talk about your experience right now. People may approach you and ask, "So, how was Costa Rica?" How can you begin to summarize all you learned, experienced and felt in response to a question like that? You may not even know the first thing to say. That's OK. Adjustment and re-adjustment happen or "unwind" in their own time and not on someone's strict time-schedule. Find the pace that works for you.

Space. What is your heart longing for? Do you need a friend to sit with you and ask you a bunch of probing questions? Would you rather get away for a couple of days to sit, journal, pray, go for a long walk, and process things on your own? There will be times that you will want to be in community and times when you will long for solitude. Ask yourself how much space you need. Do I need to move toward a friend or two and give them a list of questions to ask me? Is your life so busy now that you have returned, that you have no time or space to reflect? Find the space you need to process what is going on internally, or your heart will begin to leak in ways difficult to manage.

Grace. You are deeply and unconditionally loved by a God who is intimately familiar with all that is swirling around in your heart. God cares and He is present. You were created to love and be loved. The adjustment process may have revealed this to you in new and profound ways. Some cross-cultural sojourners struggle to believe that God loves them. If there were things you did that you now look back upon with regret or shame, turn toward the grace that can only be found in Jesus. Did you make sinful choices, encounter regretful situations, have to live with dysfunctional or abusive people, or are returning to a difficult situation back home? Grace covers that. Let these difficulties draw you closer to the One who loves you with an everlasting love.

Most of us can be distant from the true conditions of our hearts or blind to our faults. The Prophet Jeremiah said in chapter 17:9-10: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and beyond cure. Who can understand it? I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve." If this was your experience, then your time abroad has been a tremendous gift to you, because you have become more aware of the true condition of your heart.

Source: Murray Decker, Ph.D. (2012). Cultural Transition and Adjustment: A Guide for Student Sojourners.