The word BELONG has taken on new weight for our family this year. 

We're back at Concordia International School Shanghai — a community that was part of our lives for nineteen years. Not just as a workplace or a campus, but as the place where our children grew up, where friendships turned into Shanghai family, and where many of the moments that shaped us personally and professionally. When we left Shanghai, we joined Trinity in Bend, Oregon — a place that welcomed us with open arms during a year of transition. From there, we spent two years at Hong Kong International School. Our time at HKIS was two years of meaningful growth — rooted in faith and expressed through service in ways that left a real mark on our family. The journey we took to Bend and Hong Kong will always be a season we are grateful for. 

There was something unresolved about having left Concordia — a quiet sense that a chapter hadn't quite closed. 

Coming back this year has been harder to put into words than we expected. Walking through campus, seeing familiar faces, watching our kids reconnect with people and places from their childhood — none of it felt routine. It felt like something special. We weren't just returning to a school; we were returning to a place that had genuinely shaped us. 

Of course, we're not returning to what we left — and neither are our children. Our kids are older, closer to launching than we want to admit. We've changed too, as educators and parents who've been shaped by years of transition in ways that are hard to fully name. What makes this homecoming feel worth writing about is simple: our two high schoolers get to close this chapter of their lives in the same community that helped open it, but as the people they've grown into — not the kids they were when we left. Our oldest, entering her first year of university, looks forward to coming home for Christmas. 

Three years away — and two communities that we genuinely love and hold much gratitude for — clarified something: belonging isn't really about geography. It's about the people who have known you long enough to see you clearly, the relationships that have quietly shaped how you move through the world, the faith that gives all of it a foundation, and the rare places that somehow feel like yours even when you're not there. 

Concordia feels different now than it did before we left. But coming home was never supposed to mean finding everything exactly as you remembered it. It just means your heart knowing where it belongs and can continue to grow. 

Perhaps that is what BELONG has come to mean most to our family: not simply being in a place where we are known, but being part of a community where our story has mattered and continues to be written. After three years away and a journey we would never trade, we are incredibly grateful that this next chapter of our story begins with a word that feels especially fitting — BELONG.