We are an international family!
I am from Northern Ireland, Emily is from Japan, and Anna is straddling both. International sounds fun and exciting, and quite often it is! It’s fun to see how Emily and I see things in different ways, it will be fun to see how Anna grows up to see the world and what we can learn from her. But with all of the benefits that we gain from being multi-cultural, there are also some difficult things.
Right now Anna’s application for her second passport is in Hong Kong, hopefully being processed and approved. This is for her British passport, she already has her Japanese one. Tomorrow we go to Sapporo to get a re-entry permit for me so that I can leave Japan and return again (provided we can return before my current visa expires). Then February will be spent sorting out and applying for Emily’s visa for the UK so that we can enter the country as a family in May. It’s a fairly arduous affair that needs us to prove our marriage isn’t a sham, that we have somewhere to live in the UK and that we will be able to support ourselves while we are there.
These are all things we tend to take for granted as we (well most of us) grow up in our passport countries. We pay our taxes and get healthcare, the promise of benefits should we need them, the right to live and work in the country we call home. But now as an international family, while we have these rights, we don’t all have them in the same places. For the time being, wherever we go, at least one of us will need special permission to be there, more permission to work there and it won’t be something guaranteed indefinitely.
Recently I have been working on a message from Philippians 3:17-21 and as I work on it, I have never been more thankful that we can claim our citizenship of heaven, somewhere that we can all be openly accepted and leave the paperwork behind.
