Finding meaning/purpose abroad

"Without human society, they don't know who they are anymore. It seems that we humans were designed to find our purpose and meaning not simply in ourselves and in our own inner lives, but in one another and in the shared meanings and purposes of a family, a street, a workplace, a community, a town, a nation."

This is a quote from N.T. Wright's Simply Christian which emphasizes our need for community. The beginning of the quote is referring to someone that might decide to live a solitary life (in this case his example was a prisoner) and thus loses the ability to "know who they are anymore".

Reading these few sentences this morning reminded me of my post about missionaries yesterday. You see, those indicators that I wrote about seemingly become replacements for a few of those aspects that Wright listed which help us understand ourselves and "find our purpose and meaning." Why is that? Because when we transplant ourselves from the states to a foreign culture we lose much of our family (at least the proximity and contact), we lose our street, our familiar workplace (and workplace "structure"), our community, our town, and even our nation.

It is true that missionaries, and others residing abroad, can rebuild some of these aspects of life. But what we have found is that (1) it takes a long time to establish these things again, (2) they will remain "foreign" for a long time...after all we can do a lot of things like the Poles but we will never be Polish and (3) missionaries, at least, move a lot and thus have to re-establish all of this "life context" again wherever they end up.

No, I'm not inviting you to some pity party. Just figured this was a natural continuation from yesterday's more sarcastic post.