143: 5 Tips for Saying Goodbye (with Lindsay Nimmon)

Do you have a big life transition looming ahead? Is someone you know planning to move away? Lindsay Nimmon provides a Biblical framework for saying goodbye well, then gets practical, walking through the RAFT acronym and five tips for applying these transition principles.

• “When you’re living overseas, you’re bound to say more goodbyes and experience more grief as a result of those goodbyes than any monocultural or non-mobile peer.”
• “People are eternal beings who are not meant for endings, so goodbyes hurt, but we hear God’s call to us as Christians to go into all the world and make disciples, and so we trust that He can and does use this grief to shape mobile people into His likeness and give people full lives.”
• Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds by David Pollock
• Safe Passage by Douglas Ota
• “It is possible to form and help our families form healthy, Christ-centered life patterns surrounding transition, loss, grief, people, the world, and learning through the process of learning to say goodbye well.”
• “Saying a good goodbye to a place and a community is part of cultivating personal health and recognizing that we are loved by God.”
• Moving On: Beyond Forgive and Forget by Ruth Ann Batstone
• RAFT: Reconciliation, Affirmation, Farewell, Think Destination
• “Reconciling then, thereby fostering humility, reliance on God, and merciful attitudes, paves the way for a better exit from one community and a more open posture upon entering another community.”
• “Be specific about what you see God doing in the lives of those around you, and take this moment to encourage their souls.”
• “Tokens of the affirmation we want to give people during times of transition allow the affirmation to be revisited over and over again and help quiet the negativity that can come when people are feeling isolated.”
• A Life Overseas Blog
• “Even as we are in the process of saying goodbye to one people and place, we can begin looking ahead to the people and place we are going.”
• “It is good to begin to let your heart and the hearts of your children float on the RAFT across the ocean to the destination, trusting that Jesus is leading you there to love a different part of His creation and a different group of people for His name’s sake.”
• “Doing all of the right things doesn’t necessarily guarantee the future outcome, but it doesn’t mean that we give up either […] It does something to our own hearts even if it doesn’t create the outcome we were hoping for.”

What’s changing our lives:

• Keane: Joining a church mentoring program
• Heather: Hair getting long
• Lindsay: Loneliness

Weekly Spotlight: Asunción Christian Academy

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