Are you home, and still living out of a suitcase?

#Housing, #Practical Re-entry, #Settling In

Four months back in the country, and the suitcase is still open on the bedroom floor. Not out of laziness — because nobody in the family is quite sure yet where the clothes are supposed to go.

Housing is the least romantic and most destabilizing part of coming home. Most sending organizations do not have long-term housing for returning workers, so families land in a spare bedroom, a borrowed apartment, or a church member's basement. These arrangements are genuinely generous. They also tend to come with no privacy and no end date. Re-entry guides list inadequate housing and lack of privacy in temporary living situations among the leading sources of family stress after the field.

The hard part is not the square footage. It is not being able to unpack. A place you can arrange, decorate, and be grumpy in is part of how a person actually lands.

"You can't settle your heart into a place you're not sure you get to stay."

A few things help. Ask hosts directly how long is realistic — open-ended generosity is harder to live inside than a clear date. Give every family member one space that is fully theirs, even if it is a shelf or a corner. Unpack something anyway; photos on the wall of a temporary room still do their work. And plan on six to twelve months for housing and work to settle rather than a few weeks.

It is also worth asking before assuming there is nothing. Missionary housing ministries exist for exactly this gap, offering low-cost furnished homes to workers between assignments. A sending agency or a member-care contact can usually point the way.

Worn out from living between addresses? You do not have to sort this out alone — start at www.returnagain.org.

The suitcase will get put away eventually. Until then, needing a door that closes is not ingratitude. It is being human.