Katzung doesn’t know if Taiwan is home anymore. He and his three daughters, ages 5, 4, and 2, left the country in a hurry in March when coronavirus case numbers started getting bad and borders started shutting down. His wife, Dava, was already in the States for a visit with family and never got to go back to Taiwan to say goodbye.

They had lived there for two years, sharing their lives and their love with their Taiwanese neighbors as Katzung worked as a counselor at a university.

Now they are living in a borrowed one-bedroom apartment in Colorado. They have a borrowed car, borrowed children’s toys, and borrowed coats that the girls wear when they go outside to see the snow.

“We are in an uncomfortable holding position, a forced flexibility,” Katzung said. “These are the struggles of cross-cultural workers. We get things stripped away. Now we’re at another layer of stripping.” //

The immediate crisis has passed. People living abroad have all made the decision about whether to stay or go. But that was just the start for them. Now they have to deal with the ongoing uncertainties and the changes the pandemic has wrought.

That brings grief, and grief takes time. //

“I think one thing that we are learning is that we can be present wherever we’re at and whatever our circumstances are,” Katzung said. “Even if COVID-19 became the final straw in a series of crazy events, we want to follow God in faith and trust however he leads.”