Our Last Days at Home

The last and first days:

Overwhelmed, humbled, & loved. During our first years in Maryland, we would often leave for weekends, longer breaks, and holidays to head “home,” back to Upstate NY. For years, we took these trips “home”. But, year after year, these trips “home” transformed into “visiting family” instead of trips “home”.  It was a slow process, but Maryland was becoming our new home. The past eleven plus years in Maryland (10 in Bel Air) have been great.  There is a deep connection with one’s childhood home, but Bel Air has been a home that we chose, handpicked, and not one that we were unwillingly cast into. It has truly become our home, while Upstate NY has been relegated to being a place where we enjoy visiting -occasionally where are some fond memories we like to relive and family that we like to see. But it has ceased to be “home” to us.

Bel Air being our true home was never more apparent to me than as we prepared to, once again, leave home. While we paid a visit to see family in NY before we left, this time we were leaving Maryland, and the circumstances seem quite different than they were when we left NY over a decade ago. It was quite clear to us that when we left NY, we were leaving home for good. That chapter had already been written and read. Leaving Maryland for Nicaragua, we have every intention of returning home someday, whether it be in a year, two years, or ten years. All of this is simply because it is now our home.

Bel Air is relatively nondescript suburban town. Despite that, there is plenty we love about the area: the climate, the vicinity to big cities and what they provide, and the easy access to the ocean beaches, for example. Of course, those are things that drew us to the Baltimore area, things that we considered when we hand-picked our new home, but that’s not why it is our home.

 It’s the people. Our friends are what have made Bel Air home. As with any place, there are little idiosyncrasies that can consume an area’s population. There isn’t really a perfect place. But finding a place where one seems to fit is the key to enjoying  and settling into one’s home. Because of the friends we’ve made in Harford County, and especially the connections we’ve had with the people of Mountain Christian Church, we truly feel at home in Maryland.  

Never were these relationships more apparent than this past weekend, as we celebrated relationships that would be separated indefinitely by thousands of miles.  We set up a Facebook event called “Say Goodbye to the Izzos,” saying that we’d be at the new Sweet Frog fro-yo place in Bel Air on Monday July 24^th from 7-8-30PM. We figured anybody that we had not been able to see could swing by there, maybe a few people in and out while we hung around. Well, we were greeted by about 15 people when we got there at 7PM, and the numbers just grew. I have no idea how many people showed up to see us Monday night, but it more than I was able to spend time with and say goodbye to personally. It was so great to see so many of our friends in one place and it really did make all of us feel loved.

The outpouring of support and prayers for our move has been awesome. Even as there is sadness in our leaving, there is joy in our mission. We’ve had campers spend a week praying and raising support funds for us during Mountain CC’s week at Indian Lake Christian Camp. We’ve had friends store furniture for us so we wouldn’t have to sell it or pay for storage. We’ve had favors from friends that own businesses, and cars lent to us so that we’d have transportation after selling both of our own vehicles. Others came to our house and helped us get rid of stuff and clean – some who worked late into our very last night in the US. Nate and Julia even had friends that threw them their own going away parties, and Sammy got a special day about him in kids’ church.  Leaving the comfort and security of US culture has never really been a hurdle to us in making this move, but leaving friends from home definitely has made the move a little more bittersweet. And I humbly appreciate every one of the people that helped us to get here.

So now we are here and settling in. It was an exhausting few days, but today has been a pretty slow and relaxing – a necessity, really. We slept on cots last night, in the living room of the Willards’ new house, which is about ¼ mile from our house. We have made contact with other American missionaries in this community already, who have been extremely generous in their offers to help out while we get settled. While our house should be ready to move into tonight, we will probably stay at Wyeth and Wendy’s place another night, since we don’t have beds yet. These houses are huge, much bigger than our townhouse in Bel Air. That means that we have more house to furnish, though, which may or may not completely happen during our time here. Either way, the kids are excited to have their own rooms and to live in a castle, which is exactly what our new house looks like. And while that house is pretty cool, it is very apparent to us all that a cool house is not what makes a place feel like home. It will be the friends we meet and relationships we forge here that could make it feel more like home.