Feeling Far From Home with Esperansita Bejnarowicz
Have you ever felt like you were living between worlds?
Maybe you’ve moved across countries or cultures. Maybe your family story carries immigration, missionary work, military life, trauma, loss, or displacement. Or maybe, even surrounded by familiar people and places, you still carry an ache for belonging — a longing to feel fully known, rooted, and at home.
Today, Dan and Rachael sit down with Esperansita Bejnarowicz, who is a story coach, an NFTC Certified Facilitator with the Allender Center, and the founder of Far From Home.
Together, they explore the hidden grief, loneliness, and longing that can come from living “far from home” — geographically, emotionally, spiritually, and relationally.
Esperansita reflects on the experience of living between identities, cultures, languages, expectations, and communities, and the ways these in-between spaces can leave us carrying forms of grief that often go unseen or unnamed.
The conversation also considers the story of Jesus as someone deeply acquainted with displacement: a child forced to flee, a man who “had no place to lay his head,” and someone who understood sorrow, exile, and longing for home.
Through her own story and the stories of women she now serves through Far From Home, Esperansita offers language for the ache of leaving home, the complexity of belonging nowhere and everywhere at once, and the loneliness that can exist even when life appears beautiful from the outside.
Whether you’ve crossed borders or simply know what it feels like to search for belonging, this conversation offers language, comfort, and hope for the parts of us still longing to find home.
About Our Guest
Esperansita Bejnarowicz is a Life and Story Coach. Combining her 24yrs+ experience in Corporate America with Life Coaching and Narrative Focused Trauma Care (NFTC), she creates safe spaces for people to share their story, find hope and healing, and discover life-giving transformation.Through both Story Work and the community at the Allender Center, Esperansita was able to enter her past with honor and truth. Story by story, the harmful coping mechanisms and negative self-talk, turned into patterns of honor and care for her body, heart, and soul.
After leaving Corporate America in 2022, she now dedicates her time to helping others do the same through her work at The People Well. As a bi-racial, daughter of an immigrant and adult PK (Pastor’s kid), Esperansita holds a special place for BIPOC, Adult TCKs (Third Culture Kids) and Ministry communities.
Esperansita holds a Mechanical Engineering Degree and Master of Science in Administration for International Business, is a Life Coach graduate from Coach U, Inc, and has completed the Allender Center’s Certificate in NFTC Level I, II & III. She is honored to be a part of the Allender Center Fellowship Program, where she facilitates groups for NFTC Level I and Story Workshop offerings.
Her organization, Far From Home is a faith-rooted nonprofit community for women who find themselves living far from home — whether by calling, assignment, or necessity. Born out of lived experience and a God-given vision, we exist to name the unseen grief of these journeys, offer spaces of connection, and remind women they are not alone. Learn more at: womenfarfromhome.org
You can reach out to Esperansita, as well as other people trained in NFTC in your area, through our NFTC Directory at: directory.theallendercenter.org
About the Allender Center Podcast:
For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.
At the Allender Center, we value thoughtful dialogue across a wide range of voices, stories, and lived experiences. In that spirit, our podcast features guests and hosts who may hold differing perspectives. The perspectives shared on this podcast by guests and hosts reflect their own experiences and viewpoints and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, or endorsements of the Allender Center and/or The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.
To become a supporter of the Allender Center Podcast, click here. If you and your organization would like to partner with the Allender Center Podcast, please reach out to Clay Clayton at cclayton@theallendercenter.org
Episode Transcript
Rachael: Good people with good bodies, including you, my trusty colleague, good friend, Dan Allender. We are privileged today to have a guest that I think you are going to love. And it’s not uncommon for us to have experiences of liminality, meaning that threshold space in between where it can be really hard to find a sense of grounding or identity belonging. That could be because of your identity or a geographical location or different realities of your family. And I am thrilled today that we are joined by one of our friends and colleagues, Esperansita Bejnarowicz. Welcome Esperansita. So good to have you.
Esperansita: Thank you. Thank you.
Rachael: Yeah. Let me just give a little bit of some bio info on Esperansita as to why her generosity today to join us is so meaningful. Esperansita is a life and story coach combining her 24 plus years of experience in corporate America with life coaching and Narrative Focused Trauma Care. She creates safe spaces for people to share their story, to find hope and healing and discover life-giving transformation. And Es has her own story of coming to the Allender Center and doing work and getting access to more storywork and how this began to help her better understand the impact of trauma, grief, displacement, identity, and belonging within her own story. That journey led to giving birth to a nonprofit called Far From Home, a faith-rooted community supporting women who are living or have lived outside of their country of origin. And here’s what I just find to be most compelling about you Es, that as a biracial woman, daughter of an immigrant, adult pastor’s kid, and someone who’s personally lived cross-country, cross-culturally as an expat, Esperansita, you hold such a special place for globally mobile women, for BIPOC communities, for adult third culture kids, shout out to all the adult third culture kids who will know exactly who you’re talking to, missionaries and ministry communities navigating the complexities of life far from home. So I really just want to make space for you to share with us more about this work, but I will pause to give space to Dan.
Dan: The reality is Es you are such a remarkably wise and kind presence, we know that in the Allender Center. And when I saw, I think the first time I saw the website and then the videos that you produced, oh, it is one of these incredible gifts to women who as Rachael put words to, have lived now in a context in which they are far from home. But there was the reality that when I heard the stories, I’m clearly not a woman, I’m clearly not in one sense far from home, but what I found was there was so much reality for every one of us who live far from home, meaning from the home we were meant for eternity. So this is so fun, so fun to have you on and be able to let people know about you, but as well, if you’ve got friends who are far from home, but if you know you’re far from home, this is an incredible good work.
Esperansita: Yes. Well, thank you, Dan. I do thank And Rachael, thank you both for that beautiful introduction. I feel very honored to be here. And just picking up from what you said, Dan, story is really central to the Far From Home community. So many of us, when we move far from home, there is a sense of isolation, loneliness, disconnection, disorientation. There is that space in between that feels large, expansive at times, even when surrounded with people. So you mentioned it’s our Real Women Real Stories film project that we did for Far From Home and we filmed eight women from various backgrounds that were military, ex- military wives, missionaries, expats, immigrants coming and telling their stories. Each one’s so unique as we know. We each have our own stories, what brings us here generational. There were stories of cross-cultural adoption that it started from the moment birth came and they moved from one country to another and then journeyed over to the United States. So there’s just so many different stories yet, yet they hold the commonality and the common ground of what it means to be far from home.
Dan: What I would ask you just to begin with is talk about your liminality and what it means to be on so many levels, complex and yet you are a deeply centered and in many ways profoundly at home woman. And so I don’t know how to ask it better than what does it mean for you to have Rachael say that you really are the opening the dictionary and look at the word liminal and there’s your photo.
Esperansita: Oh, well, it’s funny because there’s complexity to it. And if I am centered, that has been hard fought for because that was not my experience growing up, was not my experience in my young adult life. The first time I moved away from home, I moved to Mexico working in automotive. I was there for five years, moved back, still didn’t feel centered, got married and always thought, oh, when I get married when I have children, then I’ll have a home. And I can remember so clearly the day when I was going through NFTC training, when they asked us the question, “Where’s home?” I believe, Dan, you asked the question, “Where’s home for you? ” And it was like a knife to my heart. I don’t know. I don’t think I can name home. And so I can remember we had a post weekend group that we used to get together as a BIPOC community and we talked for a long time about what home means. And so then I kind of went on my own personal journey of what does it look like to create home, to recreate home for my heart, for my body, to find a place where it can rest. Part of it was like I redecorated one of our rooms in the house to look like a ranch because I feel very much at home at a ranch. And that was certainly part of it, the physicality of home. But then the work over the years went much deeper into who am I from an identity perspective culturally being biracial. My mom is Canadian from English/German descent. My father’s an immigrant from Peru who moved to Canada in the early ’70s. And when he moved to the small town where my mom lived, no one spoke English. He was the darkest complexion person that people had ever seen. And so there was like just for him, his own journey that did impact I think our home, the journey of an immigrant to have to leave everything behind and back in the day when things were very disconnected, not like it is even today. So yeah, it has been a journey to say the least.
Rachael: Well, you’ve been doing story work, your own personal work, but you’ve also been holding space for people for several years now, but this movement toward taking these kind of intersections of your own experience of this labor that is when I hear you just even mention some of those stories, there’s a lot of trauma there too, like unchosen or chosen displacement, but the way that the impact of that would not have ever been chosen some of the racialized harm, some of those experiences of just being other, but you’ve taken your own experience with story work and now you’ve created a place to bring story work into this conversation of being far from home. And I would love to hear more, how did this come to be? And I know you’re doing this with a community of people too, so glad for you to talk more about that.
Esperansita: Absolutely. I am very honored to be able to do this work with six other women, two of which are part of the Allender Center, Tina Farist and Bethany Robbins. We partner together amongst other women who are a psychologist from Brazil who immigrated; the military woman that I spoke to of, she is a teacher and an author. And so she leads a different group of an expat from Germany. We have a cultural coach also from Germany living in the US. So it’s just an array of people that have come together with similar stories and that’s what has united us. But if I were to go back to when this kind of was birthed, it happened a couple years ago, almost around this time. It was the end of the school year. I was super excited. I had been volunteering as the librarian for my kids’ fifth grade class and the teacher said, “Oh, you’ve got to meet this other woman. She’s from Venezuela. You’re going to love her. She’s the two of your peas in a pod.” And so as I was walking out the door that last day of school, I ran into her and I just started to tell her, we spoke in Spanish immediately and immediately there’s that connection and I was telling her how excited I was. I was taking my boys on a 30-day trip to Peru for them to get to know their roots. And I was just so, so excited and just telling her, because we’re both from South America and tears began to roll down her cheeks. I realized it, that kind of foot and mouth moment where it’s like, oh my goodness, here I am telling this story of how I’m going to take my kids back to have this adventure and connect with their culture. And she is in a different situation due to the reasons why she left Venezuela. She cannot go back and that is not available for her to do with her son. And so just immediately it hit. And of course I knew enough to name her tears, right? I see her crying and I promise when I get back from this trip we will connect. And that very same day, dropping my kids off at youth group at my church, there was a woman who was walking by and I stopped her. Her name is Rose. She’s the psychologist in our group. She was dressed in this beautiful linen dress, you know middle of the summer. I said, rolled down my window, “Rose, you look beautiful. What’s the occasion?” And she said, she came over to my minivan door and she says, “Oh, well my son graduated from middle school today.” And she looked sad. And I said, “Rose, what’s up?” And she said, “Well, I didn’t get to celebrate the way I wanted to. Kids, they don’t dress up. It wasn’t the food, the festivities.” And it was so coincidental that you know it’s not coincidental. And as I drove away diagonally from that parking lot, I heard three words: far from home. And I remember looking up and I remember saying, “God, what do you mean? What does this mean far from home? What do you want me to do? ” Clearly there’s a need. Clearly there’s grief and there’s sorrow just right around me. And I thought originally maybe it’s for something to do with Spanish-speaking women outside their country from South America or Central America, because I did grow up as a pastor’s kid in a church that was birthed to meet the need of refugees coming from the Civil War from Central America. So I did grow up and so that was familiar to me. And it wasn’t until about a year later that the Lord kind of gave the full vision of it’s not just immigrant women, it’s not just refugee women, it’s any woman who is far from home because he started to resurface my own story of the second time that I was in Mexico and had my kids and I had the perfect life, perfect job, dream job. I was in advertising for automotive in Mexico City, filming commercials, doing all the things. And I had amazing husband and these two beautiful children and yet my life was crumbling and there was the deepest loneliness I had ever felt in my life so much so that is where it all kind of came crumbling down. And I remember picking up the phone and saying, you got to bring me home. I need to get back to a place where I can find help. And that’s where I actually stumbled upon story work was in that moment. And so it coincided with this deep, deep loneliness that I had experienced myself as an expat. Different, right? All three different examples of women far from home. And so then yeah, it branched out to missionaries are far from home. International students all around the world are far from home. And so in our Real Women Real Stories film project, we’re trying to identify different women of different stories and we could film for the rest of our lives because there’s so many of those stories. And so that’s kind of where it started. I probably told a lot, but that’s the backstory.
Rachael: No, it’s beautiful.
Esperansita: That’s the story.
Dan: I mean, I really am struck by the reality of your sweet gift of being willing to be affected by the people around you and let that echo into your own life and story and in one sense to let the echo invite others to that sound of we can be together in a way in which we cannot make up the reality that we are not home, but there is something about the interplay of care, honor, grief, being able to hold with great attunement, great kindness, the ability to be in now a new home. So with all that, and you heard Jesus say: far from home, there’s a part of, I just need to put my head down and cry.
Esperansita: Yeah, it was. And even between that, the Lord started to birth because even our logo, if you’ve seen our logo, it’s two hands holding this tender root. I have this little root, I made this actually, but it’s just a little root and it comes from Isaiah where it talks about like a tender root he shot up through the ground. And as I read that and just the Lord started to just drop even different ways in which he understands what it means to be far from when he was uprooted from heaven. And if you think of the way Isaiah talks about it, that he was out of the emptiness he came like a tender shoot from rock, hard ground. He didn’t look like anything or anyone of consequence. And it goes on and in the version that I read that I have here, it says, “Yet it was for our suffering, he carried the pain and distress of our sick to the soulness.” And that’s what really connected for me and kind of became the anger of Far From Home is that he understands our sick to the soulness. He knows what it’s like. As a child, we know he was exiled and they had to flee. They were outside of their country just for their own safety. Bible talks about him not having a pillow to lay his head on. So there’s that element of displacement. But the one that really, really struck me that we all know the story of when they go back for the census and Jesus as a 12-year-old goes missing for three days. And as a parent, I have a 12-year-old. I’m like, I can’t imagine. And two hours I’m already like, where you at? We got the app to track them, but clearly Mary and Joseph did not have that. And they found him after three days and he said, “Wouldn’t you know I would be in my father’s house?” And there was something in me that said he even was longing to be in a place that was familiar. He was longing to be home, I can imagine, even as a 12-year-old. And so that understanding that we read these stories and it just took on new meaning that he does know what it means to be far from home. And Dan, you mentioned it earlier that we are all far from home. We all live in a place at a distance of what we were created and meant for. And I know that that is the work of the Allender Center at its heart of Shalom and perfect peace and perfect connection with God, with others with ourselves. And this journey far from home, whether it’s for migration by choice, whether it’s temporary or a lot of time it’s women don’t know or families don’t know when they will be reunited or be able to go home or what have you, there is a suffering associated with it and it is not what we were meant for. And there is for sure surviving versus thriving and flourishing for many who are living outside of their country of origin, whether it’s because of language or culture. Rachael, you mentioned whether it’s by choice or not. And that’s the uniqueness of migrational loss and grief is that it doesn’t fit what is the typical society accepted reasons for grief and loss. And so many of it is it’s invisible, invisible grief that women carry. It’s ambiguous. They can’t really put a finger on it and that’s what makes it hard to name or to accept or even allow yourself to receive care for.
Rachael: Yeah. I think in some ways that’s probably what I was trying to capture with the language of liminality. There can be such an invisibility to being displaced and to being in between worlds really, right? What have you received as you’ve entered stories or had space to bring your own stories that have needed tending to? I guess there’s a part of me that’s curious, what are you learning in this work that’s both deeply impacting you, surprising you, shaping how you understand the role of Narrative Focused Trauma Care or not in helping people get to have witnesses, to get to receive comfort, it’s probably to get to find language for what they’re experiencing. So I would just love to hear more that feels honoring to share no demand or exploitation or anything, but…
Esperansita: Yeah, I think there is so much to learn and yet it’s familiar because where there’s loss, there’s grief and where there’s grief that goes unprocessed, it’s going to wreak havoc in the body. And so that is not uncommon to other trauma or loss. And so there is that familiar basis, but I think what you named is finding language. I think for my own journey, and even I can remember being able to understand my father’s journey a little bit more. I can even remember, this is a weird memory came up the other day. I used to go be at piano lessons and while I was waiting for my piano lesson, I’m around 12, 11, 12, I would sit and they have the little Reader Digest books and they’d have drama in real life. And of course it’s funny, those were the stories that I went to every single time, drama in real life. And I can remember reading an article and I went back to look for it and I’d have to go into the archives it said, but I can remember reading a story of people sharing. Obviously Canada has received over the years always an open door to a lot of refugees. And so it was reading the stories. And I can remember in that article, someone said that a smell brought them back home. And I can remember thinking to myself that day, oh, I wonder if my dad feels any of this. And it was like a fleeting thought. Never had a conversation with him, but when I moved back from Mexico the first time and he told a joke that there’s play on word joke and I laughed out loud and he turned and he looked at me and his eyes filled up with tears and he said, this is the first time in my own home that someone has understood a joke like that, that is adult, just like a play on words. And so I remember just feeling the grief after having lived five years myself, just the loneliness that you can feel. Sorry, getting back to your question, what have I learned? I think language. Language is the most important thing, which is why in the Far From Home community, we base it off the three things, mind, body, soul. So mind is the cognitive. We have feelings without borders is one of our weekly offerings that we have, teaching people that our emotions are there for us, they help us and what can we learn from them? We have a word of the week, that’s the one that I read and it’s finding language for our far from home journey, one word at a time. And we take a simple word and we look at it through the lens of a far from home journey. We also have curated content. So Mona puts together books and resources, but then we do body. Tina leads our somatic rhythms of return because unlike other trauma, like to survive, we just separate ourselves. We don’t fit, we don’t find a place. There’s language barriers, there’s cultural barriers. We can’t figure out how to get our washer and dryer fixed like we could in our homeland. We’ve given up many women if they’re a trailing spouse or accompanying spouse, they will give up their career and their dreams in order to come and to follow their spouse. And whether that’s by choice or not by choice, a lot of people who the same have to give up their education and so their identity and everything that they work for starts over. And so to survive that, right, how do you survive that? Well, you minimize it or you deprioritize. Women specifically oftentimes are trying to make sure their kids are okay or that their spouse is supported and they deprioritize their own emotions and their own feelings. And so some of that is where we come back to connecting to body, the return to body. How do we create spaces like a rhythms of return with beautiful grounding, somatic care? And this is where we also have our lament circles that this is also core to our group is, as you mentioned, Rachael, I think being witnessed, can we in this community be faithful witnesses? We don’t have to fix it. We don’t have to find a solution. We don’t have to even understand it. We can simply be a faithful witness to what another is experiencing. Bethany in her story, we’re just finishing editing her story now and she talks about what does it mean to walk into room and say, “Hi, my name is Bethany and I’m a missionary.” And to be met with eyes that just know all that carries. The cost, of course the gain, but the continual sacrifice that that might ask of a missionary who’s overseas. So yeah, it’s the return to body and then obviously the soul care is also just how do we find Jesus in all of this? How does God find us? And also core to the Allender Center is the story of Hagar. Where have you come from? Where are you going? He doesn’t ask her, what are you doing here or, why did you leave? He doesn’t wait for her to get to the destination either. He simply meets her on the journey and that’s what our goal at Far From Home is to be able to meet people in the middle of their journey and offer them a place where they can be seen, be heard, give voice, give lament, and find connection and belonging. Yeah, our tagline is belonging beyond borders because many come to believe that it’s not possible for them or that they won’t find it again. And so this is a virtual community, so you can access it from anywhere in the world across time zones, across countries. Many of these kinds of are assignment based. So military, you pick up, you leave, it’s like a revolving door of people, so connection is hard or expat, you get a new assignment, now you’ve moving country. Well, because of the nature that our community is virtual base, they don’t have to lose. This is one community they won’t have to lose if that were to happen. Yeah.
Dan: Well, I want to come back to this observation and question. How are you finding a new home now?
Esperansita: Yeah. I think that’s a good question. I’m just letting myself settle in even to this question. I think the process of this and being with women and hearing their stories, each other’s stories, there is something that feels so familiar that it allows myself even to go back to my own story, just like we do in storywork to those younger places and tend well or those places of just demand that we put on ourselves like, “You should have had it figured out by now.” Or, “Why was that still a problem?” Or, “Why can’t everyone else seems fine? What’s wrong with you? How come you haven’t figured out how to make this work?” How can this space has allowed me to actually even revisit those moments? And that came basically just I just recorded the word of the week. I happened to be in my country of origin because I live in the US, but I’m from Canada and I was in my city where I grew up and it was all around this Big V. It was a pharmacy. It had this big red V and that’s how we all knew. It was either before the Big V or after the Big V or beside it or meet you at the Big V when we were kids. And I filmed it in that location because it is no longer there. And so what does it look like even for us to name the experience of moving home and things are no longer. People are no longer what they used to be or who these relationships have changed and we get to grieve even the coming home process is not always easy. And so for me, I think I have just as we’re building the community and building out the content and we have self-paced courses that walk people through what is migrational loss, what is migrational grief, what is lament? All these courses as well, it just has allowed me to revisit and just settle those younger places. Dan, you said that I am a centered person. I get to go back and invite those younger, dysregulated, lonely, isolated, shame-filled woman in her 40s who felt like a complete farce who at work I was one thing and at home I was another in the loneliness of my closet thinking my family is better off without me seriously and I need help. And so what does it mean to go and tend? I’ve tended to parts of those stories, but this is new levels that it has allowed me to go back and say, well, of course you were miles away. You had two young children. You did not have a support system. And of course support systems can even be riddled and it can be complex too. But of course you tried to figure things out in ways that weren’t always the best and life giving for you. And so how do I invite a gentleness in care and say, yeah, well, it would make sense that being that far without support, without anyone to go to, it was not as easy as you remember it to should have been for you.
Dan: The word for me is reiterative.You have allowed yourself to give away something that is so desperately needed that is a place, a context, a web of relationships that can be trusted and allowed to slowly invite a person’s heart to their own story. And I think often what gets missed here and maybe it’s so obvious, but we do this for ourselves. And if that is considered to be selfish, I think that is the ultimate foolish. We are indeed mutually engaging on behalf of one another and you have been healed in some sense through doing Narrative Focused Trauma Care work, but that healing is just a small gift to then create risk to offer. But in the offering, it is such a sweet gift to have those whom you love now bring you back to the realities that need ongoing care and healing. So what a beautiful cycle. What a beautiful, wild cycle. Rachael, do you have any other directions because I have about 14, I’m going to be quiet.
Rachael: I do, but I think it’s more of like an observation that maybe you could … One of the things I’m so struck by is I would imagine in this particular unique, even complex and very diverse intersection of women that there is a lot of spiritual abuse. So I’m going back to the ways you’re allowing this story of Jesus instead of it being like, well, Jesus was the ultimate exile. Do you see him complaining or this is your sacrifice to God? Or whatever those things are that sometimes get us surviving, that help us be okay. But to let Jesus even have grief to be looking for God in the temple to let that be a part of the story. I would imagine there’s a lot of places that you’re very gently and kindly without directly confronting ways that people have maybe been cut off from God or cut off from healing or comfort by maybe sometimes well-intentioned people or coping mechanisms that are coming out of some of our spiritual formation that actually I don’t know if God is needing us to cut off our emotions or to cut off our bodies in order to be faithful or to be loving or to be that sense of selflessness. And so I’m just very struck by the kindness of that, the mercy, the mercy of that, the disruptive mercy of that. And I don’t want to put something on the people that doesn’t feel true. I’m just imagining even in my own life the ways in which especially ambiguous grief, we’re certainly supposed to just get over it and move on. So just very mindful of some of the waters you guys are navigating and trying to build pathways of healing and I think spiritual formation that maybe are giving people greater access to who God is and the love of God that’s available.
Esperansita: Yeah. You’ve named something Rachael that there is all… spiritual abuse in the sense of even the demand to be grateful. You should be grateful you’re here or grateful that you escaped war and leaving no room for grief or the idea that gratitude and grief can coexist. We’re hearing that so much in many of the refugee immigrant stories is like they’re even afraid there’s a hesitance or resistance to even come to a lament circle or put words because they feel like they don’t have the right to. And you can understand in situations where we are, there’s good reason why they would feel hesitant or like, maybe this is not for me. So there’s a lot of comparison of an expat story. And so we do in storywork, can we for a moment put the comparison aside? What does it mean for a missionary to constantly hear, “Well, what amazing opportunity you’re serving God?” And so there is that overlay of, oh yeah, but there’s a cost. There’s a cost of children living out of suitcases or not having the stability or just an expat moving with privilege. When I moved, I chose I had privilege. My life was comfortable. And what does it mean that even in that comfortability, there was great suffering behind closed doors. And so yeah, there is a lot of opportunities for the demands that we put ourselves even for the spiritual abuse or that what we’ve learned and the echoes that we should be more grateful.
Dan: Well, with an expat, with a immigrant family, with almost everyone that you’re engaging, they are susceptible to harm. And in that there are predators and there are cruel, cruel teachers.
Rachael: Absolutely.
Dan: Bus drivers, not going through every profession, but the reality of how many missionaries I have worked with whose children have suffered some form of sexual violation by other missionaries and/or by those whom they serve. So the reality of you’re not just dealing with the reality of I’ve lost my home, you’re dealing with the reality that when people lose something of that centered grounded, even if it was unsafe, there’s still other forms of danger when they move into that world and it just creates the potentiality of not only loss but the heartache of, my children are now suffering, I’m suffering and that interplay of, can I grieve and can I also be angry that this new world has actually brought new suffering that I didn’t have language for? So what we know is that what you are doing is rare. I have never seen, and I’m not saying that I have access to all ministries, but I’ve never seen something that holds the purpose, the passion, and something of that deep commitment to story. So we say to you, dear friend, thank you, thank you. And how can I commend this more? I hope every person who’s listening to this podcast just at least clicks on to Far From Home and begins to get a sense of whether they support you financially, whether they support you with regard to introducing at least to have a heart to be able to pray for you, your team and these women. We are honored, honored to be with you in this.
Esperansita: Thank you so much. There is nothing more than the prayers, of course, obviously financial support we do have. We do see women who are coming who the membership is as accessible as we could make it at this point at $24 a month and women who just do not have the fines. And we do not turn anyone away. So any woman is welcome and they just have to reach out. That’s all on the website. But yes, the prayer for us, we have dreams. We have big dreams of story groups specific for TCK, story groups specific for women and have specialized care, whether it’s military or for those who are grieving loss of parents or death far from home, that is a reality. There is a hope for, you named it, there’s domestic violence that is when a family is isolated and domestic violence becomes an issue. So all of the abuses can happen because they are vulnerable, because they are cut off and isolated and separated from support systems and protection, that can happen. And so there are some dreams to be able to create spaces, even niche spaces for within our community. So yes, the dream is big. So prayers are obviously so appreciated and needed. So thank you for that. Yes.
Dan: Welcome. Welcome, welcome.