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Renata just graduated from the University of Toronto studying Human Resources and Psychology. She served in U of T's Chinese Christian Fellowship during university, and is currently serving at her church, Christ the King Toronto.
Graduating in the midst of a pandemic is strife with duality: the heartbreak of being far away from my family and not having an in person convocation, yet singing with thankfulness at how faithful God has been in my life these 4 years in Canada. Much of the past four years have been a mix of both indescribable joy and deep sorrow and longing.
Reflecting back at the past 4 years, I can’t help but remember the pain and struggle that comes with living across the world from my family: the isolating and deep sorrow of watching friends go home over holidays and being stuck in residence because home is too far, going 8 months without seeing my family, facing the derisive stereotypical comments that people make about rich international students, struggling with depression, and the loneliness of winter. So many times, I felt so alone (and cold.. because Canada). Many times, I questioned why God brought me all the way here if I was going to suffer so much? I remember nights where my heart wrenched and I couldn’t stop crying, asking Him this question. I felt bad at times, when I felt sad and homesick: after all, it was ultimately my choice to go to university here, and my parents had worked so hard to support my decision. I thought about how hard they worked and sacrificed for me to come here, and felt bad that I was sad about coming here, which made me feel sad, guilty, depressed, confused.
I thought for a long time that the way to get over my homesickness was either: 1. To just go back home after graduating or 2. To find people to make me feel less lonely. I constantly toyed with both options when things felt like they were too hard, plunging into escape thoughts of “I’m going to just go home” or using peers and relationships as “solutions” to my emotions. For some sovereign reason, both options never worked: I found myself getting into a non Christian relationship full of guilt and shame, and the door to go back home never really opened with visa restrictions, and finding work in Canada instead of Singapore.
I thought that I could cure my loneliness myself - that the cure to loneliness comes from a place, or a person. But God, showed me that he doesn’t only offer the ultimate cure to my emotional pain, but he sits with me in the liminal, in the gasping for breath, on the bedroom floor in tears alone.
Not only that, He calls me to not find security and comfort in settling down in a place, but rather that he calls us to be sojourners. Hebrews 11:8-10 says,
8 By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9 By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
He showed me how the home and place I was homesick for was not only back in Singapore, but that my cries are cries of the sojourner - being in a land not my own, knowing that my ultimate home is not one that is built by man, but one by God. I’m learning to see each chapter of life as a brief chapter, in a big book authored by Him. Wherever I am in that story at every moment is not a permanent house, but a place: a story of a girl who is sojourning towards a city with foundations built by God. The author of the story does more than compose it, but His worldview, identity, passions are diffused through every page. Jesus himself was a sojourner, rejected by the people of his earthly dwelling, and many people in the Bible lived as sojourners and exiles in foreign lands - God gave me faithful assurance that just as he walked alongside and before all these sojourners: He has already walked before me and promises to walk with me in this next chapter.
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